The iPhone walled garden is what gets my goat, particularly when it comes to the impact it's had on my children. Combined with an observation that there is a distinct subset of people who buy iPhones who seem uninterested in how technology works or engaging deeply in solving technology interop problems when things go wrong. I get that's part of the feedback loop -- you buy an iPhone because "ack, technology! I just want things to work" and Apple has done an excellent job of capturing this market, extracting a price premium for it, and delivering on this hope.
Regarding the children, what I see in my community is many of the iPhone-using parents upgrade phones immediately when a new model comes out, and the old phone goes to the kids. You get a bunch of 10 to 14 years olds packing iPhones, many without a SIM, all "texting" with one another. Except mostly they aren't really texting in the SMS sense, they are iMessaging. And they have no clue or interest in figuring out why iMessage doesn't always work very well across the iPhone <--> Android border. This is exacerbated by the fact that kids get new phone numbers, some of which are still registered to the former owner's iMessage account (have fun explaining all that). It creates cliques and exclusionary behavior ensues, and boy let me tell you when you are not in the cool kids' group text because your dad won't pay the Apple tax and bought you an Android phone, it can make for some sadness and frustration.
All this probably says as much about the school culture my kids are immersed in as it does about the technology.
To your first point, as a big Apple user of 2+ decades, I enjoy technology and tinkering, but I want control over when and how the need to tinker pops up. I don’t necessarily want to tinker with my phone or with my computer at all times, particularly when I’ve come home from programming for 8 hours. When I need my tinker fix there’s always personal programming projects and Linux distros and keyboard building projects and such that I can turn to on my own time, not whenever my phone or laptop decides it wants to be difficult.
Also as an anecdote, it was Macs that got me deeper into OS internals and programming as a kid — first on Classic MacOS through hacking apps, games, and the OS itself via ResEdit as well as programming silly toy apps with REALBasic. Later on, it was early release of Mac OS X (I jumped on board at 10.0.4) with the huge new world brought by a real *NIX terminal and the powerful development environment provided by Objective-C+Cocoa and Project Builder+Interface Builder (Xcode precursors). These were major factors in my journey to becoming a software engineer as an adult.
The iMessage thing sucks, I can see similar issues happening in other contexts however (like people getting bullied into using Facebook for example).
To be honest, I mostly see Android users trying to defining people by which phone they use. Talking about walled gardens and gullible people willing to pay the “Apple tax”. Particularly in the tech community there seems to be a subset of people that think using an iPhone is “stupid”.
To me Android and iOS both seem to have issues. Which you use is up to you. We’re in a sucky situation where you either get a phone designed by an advertising company or a phone that is entirely closed source (and limited to a single vendor).
The walled garden is one of Apple's strengths. I joined the ecosystem because there is a walled garden, not despite of it.
There is some anecdotal evidence that Apple is heavyhaded with their approval process but, for the most part, it's a success.
The parent-kid thing is a societal problem, not an Apple problem. Can hardly blame a company because the kids of their customers don't want to be inclusive (exclusivity is more than just what device you use).
The problem here is that the walled-garden approach is being used on communication services.
It's arbitrarily impossible to send text to/from Android with iMessage. It's arbitrarily impossible to use Facetime with anything other than iOS or OS X.
You may have found this walled garden to be a feature, but that doesn't mean every person you associate with does; yet you are likely imposing it upon them.
This problem is exasperated by the target market: People who want something that "just works" are generally going to be the most frustrated when they can't communicate across platforms; and most likely to blame it on everyone else, while refusing to solve the problem on their own end. Apple is taking advantage of this mentality, and abusing us all.
Apple is not abusing anyone (maybe their assembly workers, but even that is a stretch). They are providing a service and no one is forced to use it.
At the office, we use Slack and Webex for communication. With some friends, we use Skype and Messenger for video calls, with others it's FaceTime. No one is ostracized for having an Android. Not at work and certainly not in private.
> Abuse is the improper usage or treatment of an entity, often to unfairly or improperly gain benefit.
I would say that their actions clearly fit that description.
They are abusing their customers by preventing them from using software outside their controlled ecosystem, and they are purposefully creating incompatible communication protocols in order to make everything around them effectively worse.
You could prevent others from using alternative systems by simply not collaborating with other players (for any one of a million reasons) and not building compatible software. It's not abuse, it's the belief that they don't need other parties to build great product.
I deal with this even with college students I work with. Nobody seems to care or realize why Apple doesn't let you "blue bubble text" with Android users, and many don't seem to understand there's no technical limitation, and that its only Apple trying to close off their ecosystem.
Full ACK. However, I'm optimistic, kids can be educated and evventually some of them will be interested in understanding how tech works, digging deeper and deeper and getting used to the hacker culture.
These families where luxurious old IPhones are available plentifully are probably a bit odd, but for the purpose of hacking, IPhones are not too bad. They can be rooted, they have good hardware on board and batteries which last a decade. When I was young, I only had old lame personal computers from the household trash. I whish I had portable devices to play with! :-)
This sounds like Blackberry and BBM when I was growing up in high school. I had a Sony Ericsson, and would feel fairly excluded from other friends who were all talking on BBM. But I have grown to realize how much of a fad that was and how quickly it passes.
Regarding the children, what I see in my community is many of the iPhone-using parents upgrade phones immediately when a new model comes out, and the old phone goes to the kids. You get a bunch of 10 to 14 years olds packing iPhones, many without a SIM, all "texting" with one another. Except mostly they aren't really texting in the SMS sense, they are iMessaging. And they have no clue or interest in figuring out why iMessage doesn't always work very well across the iPhone <--> Android border. This is exacerbated by the fact that kids get new phone numbers, some of which are still registered to the former owner's iMessage account (have fun explaining all that). It creates cliques and exclusionary behavior ensues, and boy let me tell you when you are not in the cool kids' group text because your dad won't pay the Apple tax and bought you an Android phone, it can make for some sadness and frustration.
All this probably says as much about the school culture my kids are immersed in as it does about the technology.