>He works in IT at an unnamed company, and his team noticed something crazy: of the 500 employees at the company, only 8 of them chose to use an Android phone. Everyone else — all 492 of them — chose an iPhone over Android phones. It was because they didn’t want to be “green bubbles,” a reference to the fact that iMessage chats in the iPhone’s Messages app use blue bubbles while SMS chats are displayed with green bubbles. Forget all of the great advantages iPhones might offer, iMessage is the main reason all these people wanted an iPhone. 98% of the employees at this company went with Apple over Android, and for the majority of them, it was mainly because of a single service.
If people didnt "throw away the key" services like Google ID, Microsoft ID, and Facebook ID wouldnt exist. Centralized OAuth providers are here to say, even if a lot of us on HN dont like them. You want to get into your tshirtclub account after facebook locks your account, too bad!
>Sensible people do not deliberately handcuff themselves to trillion dollar megacorps and then throw away the key.
>Yes they do
>It was because they didn’t want to be “green bubbles,” a reference to the fact that iMessage chats in the iPhone’s Messages app use blue bubbles while SMS chats are displayed with green bubbles
Sorry, it seems to me like the story you're relating supports the point of the post you disagree with. Surely "sensible" people don't choose a phone on the basis of what color their messages appear as on other people's phones.
(I think there are sensible reasons to choose either platform. But the reason you're talking about here certainly isn't.)
I guess to each their own - I don't consider that sensible. Personally I've never been in an environment where it was common to judge others for the model of their phone, and complying with that level of control over my life and decisions, even for a moderate social reward, doesn't seem sensible to me.
If you've never dealt with this level of pettiness, signaling, and superficiality, then you've never operated at any meaningful level of power, unfortunately.
Apple doesn't care. (despite me thinking they should, their biggest growth was right after iTunes for windows.) They care about offering services to their paying customers, not anyone else. If you don't buy their stuff, they don't care about you. Compared to fb/Google who care about you to make you pay attention to ads, it's a refreshing twist.
Facebook/Google care about offering services to everyone on the planet, not just the richest that have more disposable income than most people have in lifetime savings. Compared to Apple that cares about you only to make you pay ever-increasing amounts of money to maintain membership in its closed ecosystems, and blocks off any sort of mixed-ecosystem use, it's a refreshing twist.
>He works in IT at an unnamed company, and his team noticed something crazy: of the 500 employees at the company, only 8 of them chose to use an Android phone. Everyone else — all 492 of them — chose an iPhone over Android phones. It was because they didn’t want to be “green bubbles,” a reference to the fact that iMessage chats in the iPhone’s Messages app use blue bubbles while SMS chats are displayed with green bubbles. Forget all of the great advantages iPhones might offer, iMessage is the main reason all these people wanted an iPhone. 98% of the employees at this company went with Apple over Android, and for the majority of them, it was mainly because of a single service.
If people didnt "throw away the key" services like Google ID, Microsoft ID, and Facebook ID wouldnt exist. Centralized OAuth providers are here to say, even if a lot of us on HN dont like them. You want to get into your tshirtclub account after facebook locks your account, too bad!