Nerdfury said:
Er, what? Oh, I see - you're one of Those People, who sit about telling people they suck when they buy things you, personally, t have a problem with. You're in the same crowd as people that mock anyone that buys a particular brand of phone, or TV, or console, or clothing, pretending you're some kind of superior creature because you didn't.
You little rant above is just depressingly pathetic. You sound like just another little hateful person who got it into their head that something is shit and decided to keep on hating it when the word around them were loving it. You're the same kind of guy that ranted about Harry Potter, Twilight, Spore, Mirror's Edge and anything remotely popular simply because people around you liked it and that shit you right off.
You seem to think that I'm a hater of things because they're popular. You're way off the mark: in this case, I hate the iPhone because everybody's proclaiming it to be the Second Coming, when in fact, it's missing elements of smartphone design that have been around for years. More accurately, I hate the iPhone because it has the potential to change the smartphone, which was becoming stagnant and stale, and that potential is a good thing. What Apple are doing with the iPhone, making people think that a hermetically-sealed philosophy is a good thing in an era where more can be done by opening the phone up to electronic and software tinkerers.
Apple seems set to tell smartphone designers that omitting basic elements of the smartphone (expandable memory, easy transfer of data without a proprietary software package, interchangeable batteries and SIM cards) is alright, as long as the phone is flashy. That it's perfectly acceptable to force users to use their proprietary software if they want to do anything with the phone, instantly locking out Linux users and frustrating Windows users. As an open-source advocate, hermetically sealing your device is a one-way ticket to pissing me off.
So, no, I don't hate the iPhone just because it's popular; I hate it because they have such potential to change the smartphone, and yet waste it all on a device which has, as I see it, a lot of failings.
By the way, I don't hate other things because they're popular either. In terms of the examples you raised, I actually liked Harry Potter. I haven't seen Twilight, so I'm not fit to comment on it; I don't like what I've heard about the general aesthetic, and the "sparkling vampires" thing doesn't make any sense at all, but then, it's made for teenage girls, isn't it?
Spore was a case of a potentially good package made unremarkable by hype - not rubbish, just unremarkable. The thing which really nailed the coffin for that game was its draconian DRM; again, as an open-source enthusiast, that's just a way to piss me off immediately.
Mirror's Edge is the only one of those things that you've listed that I have a strong dislike for, and even then, it isn't because it's popular. It's for completely odd reasons, because I just really dislike the protagonist. I don't like the tattoo on her face, I think she has a peasant's name, and I don't like the shoes either. Apart from that, I'd say that Mirror's Edge was more remarkable because of its potential to the games industry - more an elaborate technical demonstration of the potential of first-person perspective games past the clichéd market - than its potential as an actual game.
Nerdfury said:
Let me let you in on a little secret: I bought an iPhone and I fucking love it. After several months of checking out reviews and technical specs, performing play tests with other phones and researching, I settled on the iPhone over any other device, based on educated decision. The iPhone suits my needs perfectly in every way. And that annoys the living fuck out of you.
Of course it annoys the living fuck out of me; what you're essentially saying to me is, "The open-source model is rubbish and I'd much rather have a device which is tied in to a proprietary software package which runs slowly and unpleasantly on Windows machines, and not at all on Linux machines. Also, I don't like having tactile or even haptic feedback, so I'll annoy everybody else by helping the adoption of touchscreen-only phone models into the market."
Again, it isn't a case of disliking it because it's popular; it's what that popularity represents.