Comment Re:Not a chance in hell (Score 1) 276
Actually it is because of their "cult" that I have a new laptop. 6 months ago a 'fanboi' bought a fully loaded laptop that was the best they had to offer and a month later they released the same laptop with a glossy mouse pad so he sold the computer for 1k and bought a new one to have the glossy pad despite the hardware being otherwise identical.
The phones and iPads are selling to many non-fans, but apple is guaranteed to sell 1 million just due to marketing and followers who will buy it because it was released. Then after getting that much traction it is a somewhat self sustaining marketing effort. I have used products with equivalent polish that did not have the same mindshare despite being better in many ways.
I also know of at least one iPad that was bought by someone who is unlikely to turn it on again after a month. It wasn't needed, it was a new apple product to add to their netbook, laptop, desktop, iPhone, and iPod. (netbook was not an apple)
And "it just works' is a clever rephrasing of "we only got it working one way and other implementation are not supported.
There is a world of complexity between consumer device (turn on, turn off, and play) and enterprise (remote locking, device tracking, central administration, etc) Apple went for the simple tight set of features that lets them sell to the largest market. This is smart, but if you need it to do more there is just nothing to build upon. You quickly realize it is ONLY a consumer device.
The "one apple way" conceals the fact that there just isn't flexibility to do things other ways. It is like they do not have the bandwidth to make a robust system so they make a limited set of features then polish the hell out of them. And that works for consumers. But I don't think they CAN move from where they are to enterprise support as too much is missing and too much under the hood was compromised to improve consumer experience.
If you need better security or to customize something for enterprise usage you find that documented features may not work properly or have serious flaws due to scary kludges in the apple implementation.
You can not DO enterprise apps on iPhone and you can NOT do enterprise support on iMacs without a bit of footwork. The IT staff spends as much time supporting 10 macs as they do a hundred PCs (linux and windows). And what is manageable is because the Linux tools worked for mac. But differences are never documented so it is a lot of trial and error to find what does work.
They make great consumer devices, but supporting them is a headache for IT, enterprise developers, and techies.
If you step out of the walled garden you really have to do a LOT of deep hacking to get basic things to work properly. "It just works" when approached from the right angle but from any other you realize that was a horrible horrible kludge of appalling grandeur. I expect this thin veneer is why so few things update at a time if you go outside what is currently supported they really have to write everything from the ground up.
But with that said if you are needing to make a simple application that fits within the APIs and tools they do have these have good support. iPhone libraries were much better than Blackberry and Windows mobile in many ways. The database was a joy to use, the interface widgets are very polished and the tools are well developed. But any quirks you hit after leaving the beaten path are going to be covered by a random external blog post and not apple. And they usually start with "After losing several days setting up centralized authentication for macs this is what ACTUALLY works and how it is different from what is suggested by apple." I have lived and died by these posts on EVERY apple device I have worked with.