zlacker

Ah, found that "heated discussion" the OP mentioned.

>>015a+(OP)
Heh. I can't blame them for doing this, but not telling people what's happening (and why) was the big mistake.

People generally want their gadgets to be as lightweight as possible, cheap as possible, last as long as possible, and be reliable. There's tradeoffs in balancing those. eg: overbuilding the battery to make the device run longer in the face of degradation adds weight, size, and cost. Somebody has to make a call on where the balance should be.

What nobody really talks about in the context of device longevity is wear levels in the onboard flash. A battery replacement or three doesn't extend that clock. It's pretty good but it doesn't last forever. This is more of an issue on devices with smaller amounts of flash storage with a lot more storage churn.

>>015a+(OP)
One nice thing HN has taught me is that I should be wary of anti-Apple claims like this. Inevitably someone comes along to add context or explain what's actually going on, and 9 times out of 10 it turns out that Apple's solution wasn't unreasonable at all.

Which isn't to say that things like the 30% app store cut is entirely defensible, though you can certainly make some halfway plausible claims in that direction (based mostly on how retail works, especially at the time iPhones were invented). Or sideloading. There are legitimate gripes. But a lot of crap spewed regularly on HN turns out to be exactly that, crap.

>>rootus+et
You can always find a reason to defend any feature. In the case of this article you could say it's more seamless to open Outlook links in their browser. And that's exactly what Microsoft's PR says.

But for some reason Apple's fans are way more insistent in defending everything and sticking to the PR department's arguments. No criticism is allowed to stand.

>>downWi+fL
I find that more often than not, the anti-fans are more strident these days than the fans are. What I like is that there are some knowledgeable fans here on HN that don't just retort with "nuh-uh!" whenever a critic levels some sort of unfounded conspiracy theory at Apple, but actually explain what is going on. They provide context, documentation, and important details that seem to get lost when the only discussion is emotional.

HN isn't perfect, but it's so much better than a lot of other online discussion forums these days.