You're familiar with the idea of satire, right?

The fact that something is a joke doesn't automatically exempt it from criticism. If a joke is making a point, it still needs to make the point well. Even if a joke is just meant to be funny, it still needs to, you know, be funny.

This "satire" is merely stating his point backwards, not cleverly exposing hidden flaws in an idea. Nobody touts the inconsistency of PHP's standard library as a strength of the language. Not many people even claim that PHP is better than Ruby. The positions he purports to make fun of aren't real. He's beating a dead unicorn.

Yeah, but they do care when the app they want to use won't work on their phone because their software is too old.

Looks pretty cool!

What did you use to build it?

The backend system is written in python using tornado (which is absolutely amazing to work with). I also pushed a lot of logic to the client (jquery).

I remember reading about this branching model and really liking the idea. The tools might actually motivate me to use it.

2 chicks at the same time

Location information could be used to connect people to a server that gives them a better connection. Not necessarily an evil thing.

That information can be had passively via a GeoIP-like service, though, since it's only usable on a wifi (and thus, tethered to some hard line) connection. Sending GPS coordinates seems rather unnecessary.

I agree with you that their software is the most compelling part of the Mac. But the reason people tend to say Apple is a hardware company is because that's where the money is made.

It's not wrong to say that the software drives the sales of the hardware. The software is outstanding, and compels people to purchase the profitable hardware.

That's fair enough. I should really have said they're both, combined. And it is the combination that is the key to their success.

Also, computer monitors are typically farther away than a phone screen, so less resolution is needed to fool the eye.

If one uses 300ppi @ 11inches as the standard for a "retinal" display, 100ppi becomes retinal at 33 inches. I don't sit quite that far from my screen, though I suppose some people may.

And a couple other popular smartphones have been retinal at their typical usage distances for several months now.

Really you need somewhat higher resolution.

Apparently 20/20 vision is defined as being able to distinguish things 1 arc-minute apart. This comes to 114 dpi at the 30 inches away that I just measured my screen at. And yet when I pick a small-but-generally-readable font, I can see that for example the leftmost leg of an 'm' looks different than the other two.

So I would say you want sufficiently high resolution that pixelization artifacts aren't visible, which means that adding or subtracting one pixel from a one-arc-minute item leaves it still at one-arc-minute. Maybe 2px/arc-minute would do this well enough, maybe it would take 3. But 1px/arc-minute still permits visible artifacts.

How did you calculate 33 inches?

I need a diagram. I'll use the one on wikipedia's visual angle page.

At 11 inches, 1 inch has a visual angle of about 5.2 degrees. But the exact number doesn't much matter. You can set two instances of the visual angle equation equal (one for the unknown distance and one for the definition of retinal, an inch long at 11 inches distance), and simplify to give you what similar triangle ratios would too. A length, s=D/11, for the side of the similar triangle opposite the eye, which by the operating definition of "retinal" has 300pixels along it. So, we can use s as a scaling factor, 300ppi/(D/11)="ppi you need at distance D to be retinal". Solve for D instead if you wish.

That might not even be clear with the diagram, sorry.

Presumably he's using a constant ppi × distance value, though it's not clear that's the right method to use

The problem is that often (not always), proprietary software is just better than any free equivalent. I will gladly sacrifice some freedom to gain quality.

Yeah, there are a few areas where free software gets killed by the proprietary alternatives. I've been waiting for free mechanical CAD and PCB layout software to appear for years. The best free alternatives (Blender, sort of? Kicad? gEDA?) are still relatively weak compared to, say, Solidworks and Altium Designer.

I guess I'd say that I'll unhappily sacrifice some freedom to gain quality.

and you're not even sacrificing freedom. all you're really doing is paying someone to do some work for you.

You're sacrificing freedom if the workers you pay don't give you free access to the source code you pay them to write.

I don't have to know how something is done for it to be worth paying to have it done.

I'm not sure freedom is what one gives up in this situation. It seems more like giving up control. And one has to do that in life just to be able to delegate tasks to others.

Is it really freedom being given up or freedom obtained by freeing up one's time to do things you value more than examining the code for the microprocessor that makes your clock radio work?

And its freedom that makes it possible for one person to offer the work of their minds to others without having to disclose everything about how it is that they are capable of doing it.

We are free to make such a deal and then later if we choose another alternative. There is no loss of freedom at any point, just the exercise of one's freedom.

It's been a godsend for me. AppleCare is great support, and has absolutely paid off for me in the past.