joemi

To be fair, those were both post-Jobs projects at Apple, so Jobs' "real artists ship" quote doesn't exactly apply.

That's not a good analogy for the situation. A better grocery-based analogy would be if there's only a single Bob's Grocery in town (and for whatever reason more Bob's Groceries can't be opened) but there is a Sally's Groceries in town. Then Bob's Groceries isn't a monopoly. The only thing Bob's Groceries is a monopoly of is Bob's Groceries, which is a useless tautological argument.

Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.

That's not how monopolies work, though.

iOS and iPadOS aren't the most dominant OSes, so therefore this can't be a monopoly.

Nice pithy statement, but police are able to do _many_ things that the general public aren't allowed to do, in order to do their jobs.

I'm not saying flock is good or anything like that, but arguing against it because the public can't do what the police can isn't a good argument.

Yeah, same. It was quite punishing to mix a bad DVD UI with a bad DVD player/remote!

It always seemed to me that (for the most part) the anticipation of special features was just because they were so hyped by the manufacturers as selling points. Kind of like when Apple makes such a big deal about the new colors their products are available in (and this is coming from an Apple fan). The one exception would be Criterion Collection DVDs which actually had worthwhile special features most of the time.

To be fair, "just trust me, bro" has _always_ been Meta/Facebook's policy. Sure, they have a big long nicely-written policies if you look for them, but they continually break them, get caught, say "sorry, my bad" and then the way they broke the policy gets worked into the new policy as something that's allowed. This has happened so many times since Facebook started.

There's at least one way where there's a direct comparison: they both have dev kits.

Game console dev kits usually cost more than the consoles they're for, not less. They're not mass produced at the scale that the consoles are, and they're sold or leased to companies expecting to make several orders of magnitude more back off the products they create with the dev kits.

Game console dev kits are typically _more_ expensive than the consoles they're for. So "full price" isn't a good argument. (The fact that they were available to the public is a stronger argument.)

Game console developers always had to (and still have to) pay for their dev kits. That doesn't really make them products in the typical sense of the word, though.

The stronger argument for it being a product is that it was available to the public.

You seem to be saying contradictory things. You're saying it's not a good incentive, but you're also saying Apple should have added it already. Why should they have already added it if it's not a good incentive? Why should they add it now if it's not a good incentive?

My argument is that adding it makes their product better, so they should add it. And if they add something that makes their product better, that's an incentive to buy it.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

And I'll admit that there's chance I'd notice what you're talking about if I saw/used it in person instead of relying on promotional photos.