Thread: Apple iPad 2
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#29
Originally Posted by Mentalist Traceur View Post
And when the majority of what's good from the other camps is taking advantage of human traits that are arguably not good for humanity as a whole in the long run?

The desire for shiny, mind-numbing simplicity, and it being okay to not have the slightest understanding of one's technology beyond the fact that it works, are not good for human progress in the long term. Yet that's what Apple constantly encourages.

Not that I disagree in general, and there are things to be learned from the success of Apple devices to be sure, but I would argue that with Apple-style marketing many of the devices on the market (even Maemo 5 if more had been invested in it and freedom to install just about anything clamped down to prevent the horrible barely-testable complexity of so much software interacting together, which is arguably the cause of most bugs on the Maemo 5 platform) could have been similarly successful. At the end of the day Apple's success did have to do with great UI smoothness/fluidness (I would disagree with it being any more intuitive than Maemo 5 or Android, and personally I find the only-one-button concept an impediment rather than an advantage), the fact that the controlled and horribly limited OS/ecosystem helped keep bugs from happening, and so on, but the majority of it, from what I have seen, lay not in the actual advantages of their platform, which are limited, but in the fact that they were happy to advertise it in a way that made the masses accept it as the best, without fundamentally stopping to question whether or not it really was.

(Which was easy enough in the US market because I admit that at the time, it was just about the only phone that did touch screen UIs and the like well. But the point is that their popularity was a mix of social engineering and circumstantial - being first to market a device that combined a bunch of features no one else put in a clean package, essentially - primarily, and inherent strengths of the platform only as a secondary effect.)

As for *****ing, personally, when I ***** about Apple, or any other company's, products, I have little interest in making myself feel better. I'm rather happy with my N900 (a bit annoyed with the latest spontaneous reboot bug I developed that I can't seem to find the cause of). For me personally, it's a matter of countering points I find to be flawed, or, in the case of recommendations, attempting an actual objective overview of each platform (and there ARE times I actually recommend people iOS devices - doesn't make me happy, but I recognize it's right for them, as much as it bugs me that it can be right for anyone). ..obviously I don't speak for some of the other people on here, but one can hope most of the posters who ***** about the iOSs flaws do so for reasons other than insecurity.
Reacting harshly (and prematurely) on false presumptions?

I would argue that the 'good' traits from the iPad can be harvested and reimplemented on an open system without compromising being open (or FOSS compatible).

Examples:
- It's been mentioned a few times about having a fluid and customizable top layer(s) while leaving the door open to the CLI or whatnot.
- A simpler sync method to replicate your data across your chosen devices (say rsync with sane defaults and a nice ui)
- All the good ui/ux points from iOS (which are hopefully not patented)
Etc.

I also think that packaging technology for the masses does not hinder people who inherently want to dive deeper into the technology out of their own desire. Do you think throwing everyone in the world into a bash dominated tech platform is good for humanity? That they should manage their appointments with cron scripts?

No. This expands the technology adopters.

And making basic things simpler frees them up to worry about 'higher level' stuffs. It doesn't work the other way around. I think you got it backward.
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