“The overriding gist of the DOJ’s lawsuit against Apple brought to mind, for DF reader E.G., Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron. Despite being an enormous Vonnegut fan, I couldn’t recall reading it before. It’s so apt. As E.G. quipped in his email to me, “Only in making all products, services, and experiences equally bad, will we have equality and fairness.””
The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur
All you need to know about Gruber is in this claim of his about phone photography, in a critique of a NY Times tech journalist who deigned to acknowledge that readers could just use flash to get better low-light photos:
A mainstream technology columnist should be explaining to readers why they should not use flash, and how best to capture low-light photographs without it. “You could always just use flash” is technology malpractice.
In reality, a mainstream technology columnist’s job isn’t to encourage readers to cough up hundreds of dollars to buy the newest phone for the sake of something that might be of negligible importance to most of them.
Gruber clearly thinks his job is to always encourage readers to buy the latest Apple phone. At least when his job isn’t to sniff his own farts.
Flash is also technology! Most photography and videography is done using artificial light! There aren’t many people walking around with spy satellite lenses like fucking Kubrick to do natural light camera work.
Also I think he’s a bit of a fancy watch douchebag.
Apple fanboys: “Apple has a singular, perfect vision for how people should interact with technology. I would get all my sensory organs replaced by Apple peripherals if I could. They should be allowed to trample us.”
Is Apple obligated to ship an iMessage client for other platforms? For free?
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Open secure messaging protocols with freely available and unencumbered specifications and even implementations are good, actually.
I wish XMPP or Matrix or whatthefuckever existed so that we didn’t have to rely on fifteen fucking proprietary IM systems to communicate with an adequate portion of our friends.
Can we make it an outright criminal offense to ship a new messaging application without an accompanying RFC detailing the format? With aggravating circumstances if you outright forbid third party clients that end up being created anyway.
it’s always great when these guys respond to well-established antitrust law by incorrecting the world on the concept of “competition” from first principles
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