On 5/16/2014 3:53 PM, Joakim wrote:
On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 14:15:20 UTC, Chris wrote:
Mind you, how many of the big "be all end all"-technologies that have
been hyped over the years are really good (including community base
projects)? JS, Java, Ajax, PHP, Ruby, iOS, Android ...? With good I
mean really good, not omnipresent.
Agree with you on all of those, except for iOS. I know many of us hate
how much its success is driven by marketing, but it appears to be a very
solid product technically. At least that's what I read, I haven't
bought an Apple product in a decade because of their crazy stance on
patents and how closed they've become.
However, just looking at iOS technically, even the latest iPad Air and
iPhone 5s run on just 1 GB of RAM and still regularly outperform Android
devices, which is crazy considering Android superphones/tablets have up
to 3 GBs of RAM these days. iOS devices repeatedly benchmark as the
least laggy for touch. Nick may not believe in people voting with their
wallets, but iOS devices have garnered Apple a couple hundred billion in
profits so far:
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-and-Apple-reportedly-earned-87.9-of-the-smartphone-market-profits-for-the-last-6-years_id54030
I suppose you can hate on Obj-C, but that's not really iOS. The latest
release got bogged down in all the bling, but that's more like Apple
heaped too much icing on top: the cake is still great.
Why isn't iOS good?
The problem with iOS devices isn't software bloat, it's overall design
and, as you mentioned, Apple's...uhh...orwellian-ness. (IMO, anyway) I
could go on and on and on about iPhone's design problems (and have done
so ;) )
And I'm not surprised Android is a little slower/laggier than iOS, what
with Dalvik. I don't care how much they've optimized it, a JVM-alike at
the system-level on a mobile device is just asking for "second-place at
best" (performance-wise anyway). They're now forced to go out of their
way with stuff like ART just to mitigate some of the problems Dalvik
introduced. That's the one big thing I *do* think Apple really got right
- native system-level with ARC, instead of mobile JVM clone.
(FWIW/BTW, MS has actually hit a rather interesting middle-ground with
WinRT's sort-of-a-VM-but-not-exactly approach. Not that I'm a fan of
Win8/WinRT/Metro/MS/etc, but that particular aspect is quite noteworthy
IMO.)
> Nick may not believe in people voting with their wallets,
Well, to be clear (and without trying to get too political about it), I
do believe in *attempting* to vote with one's wallet, and that it can be
a *factor* in what succeeds and what doesn't. I just don't believe it's
remotely close to being the sole primary factor or that it remotely
implies "what succeeds must therefore be good". And I think all that's
unfortunate.
