Reasons to love AND hate Sony, Apple, and/or Microsoft


Blue Protoman

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Mar 6, 2010
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The above three companies get a lot of flak on this site. Me, personally? I think we should see both sides of the coin before making such rash judgements. So, share your facts and stories. For every bad thing you say about one of the above companies, you must say a good thing of roughly equal magnitude. Preferably something that they've got over the Pandora or other independent/open source/Linux products. The more you can back up your statements, the better.


Let's start.
 
fuck apple, fuck xbox


did i do this right?
 
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I own an Xbox 360 and I realy enjoy it.


I tend to hate Sony nowadays, but without the PS1 we would not have any games for the nice PS1 emulator :)
 
You sure? Perhaps those developers would have gone with the Nintendo 64 or Sega Saturn instead.
 
Microsoft is a money-grubbing, no-good company with terrible leadership and no ethics whatsoever. It must stick its hand into everything, and if it is not No. 1 straight away, it dumps its infinite supply of money into eliminating the competition until it is No. 1 by default. It is the epitome of what makes capitalism unfeasible in this modern age.


On the plus side, they made the Kinect, which has been cracked by the open-source community and used for the betterment of humanity, such as allowing one to generate giant statue-gods of oneself in Minecraft.
 
Microsoft is a money-grubbing, no-good company with terrible leadership and no ethics whatsoever. It must stick its hand into everything, and if it is not No. 1 straight away, it dumps its infinite supply of money into eliminating the competition until it is No. 1 by default. It is the epitome of what makes capitalism unfeasible in this modern age.


On the plus side, they made the Kinect, which has been cracked by the open-source community and used for the betterment of humanity, such as allowing one to generate giant statue-gods of oneself in Minecraft.


Do you know who Jacques Fresco is by any chance?
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Honestly, I don't like any major company. While we're on the topic of gaming giants I say I hate all of them money-hungry smart-talking robots. I can't stand their sales pitch. If I had to pick i'd say nintendo is my favorite, but only because they created most of my favorite franchises. I own a wii for which I download games for free and play through the homebrew channel. I'm also getting a 3DS which given time I will hack.


The future is in open source, something these giants would never favor.
 
Sony:


-PSP my first experience in hackable handheld gaming and homebrew, solid product for it's time specs, hardware quality. Sucks they never embraced the homebrew scene more, blocking homebrew caused the psp to be one of the most hacked systems of all time and allowed for piracy and the software sales show this. They are still *as of right now* still leaning heavily on a hardware platform that was released some 7 years ago.


-Mylo v1/v2 the first sony device I owned that actually allowed 3rd party homebrew in form of widgets similar to android. Platform was solid, device had a touchscreen and a keyboard, but lack of 3g made it impractical. The same hardware specs as a PSP but didn't include the same OS. The OS was locked down despite allowing home brew and no commercial software titles which made no sense at all. Marketing didn't push the device and lost official support. All it is good for now is IM'ing and there are much more powerful and robust platforms to develop on.


Apple:


-ipod price point, useability, hardware.. the device is an easy device to love. Access to almost all the same functionality of the iphone makes it one of the best touchscreen MIDs in existence still to this day. The device is annoyingly locked down and apple attempts to chase the hackers around in circles with every software launch. Piracy runs rampant on the device but due to popularity of iProducts the developers of paid software are probably not hurting for software sales.


-iPad the bastard child of a ipod and netbook meet in a surprisingly great mix. It makes the perfect livingroom computer and size wise makes it ideal for out and about. The platform shares the same pros and cons as the ipod in almost every respect. It is just 5 times bigger physically.


Microsoft:


-windows I grew up on dos and windows, the platform allows for the perfect balance of freeness for home use with the ability to lock down under enterprise environment. Scales well on the workstation to any size network and has the largest software library to choose from. The company has taken this for granted or taken advantage of this and is trying to put a stranglehold on the entire computing industry by requiring superficial updates to the OS rather than just making the current os more useable or secure. They do this every decade it seems just to boost software sales.


-windows mobile absolutely hate windows mobile, but love the concept, hate the execution. A popular mainstream mobile os that allows you to install what you want and how you want. But the functionality and capability of the os is long dated and it teases at the full functionality of a desktop environment rather than having it. Software titles are too overpriced for the functionality when compared to other platforms. Seeing how this is primarily used in enterprise environments it is understandable they usually have more money to spend on titles, but for the end user consumer it makes it a difficult to bite at what they have to offer.


-xbox 360 love my xbox with passion, great software, allows homebrew in forms that seem reasonable from a security standpoint and the live service while sorta overpriced for something that should be free is something I've paid for year after year since inception so take from that what you will. Hardware failure rate of near 50% due to overheating is inexcusable and some engineer needs to get fired for that slipup in R&D.
 
Sony - well, they make average quality TVs if you ask me (although my friend insists on buying sony everything)and charge well over the mark for them too. The ps3's store and online services pale in comparison to those of the xbox, although it's not really fair to hold the two together as you have to pay to use microsoft's services. That said, the playstation3 homescreen and menu is one of the drabbest UIs that I've ever used, I can see that they were going for simplicity and sophistication but they've actually just landed on boring. I truly believe that if Sony made the menu more vibrant then they would have a much more attractive system, as it stands I barely use my PS3.


Microsoft - I think that it is disgraceful how much they charge for a copy of windows.


I sold my iphone 4 recently and bought a windows phone 7 handset. I thought I'd give it a try as I only have to wait until December before I get a new phone on my contract. Well, I find it is pretty dreadful.


The interface is reasonably nice, but they made the bizarre decision to completely lock the phone down. For instance, although most of them have an sd card inside, it is locked in, you can't actually change it without wiping the phone and voiding your warranty.


Also, you have to use zune to transfer music and pictures to and from the device, which is better than itunes but still far from ideal.


The store is woefully lacking in good quality apps and games, and what they do have is disgustingly over priced (the general minimum price being £2.50 vs apple's 59p). I know it's early days yet but they're aiming down itunes pee hole and they knew that they were facing a giant torrent of steaming hot app laden wee, and this is microsoft - they really should have gotten a large base of quality games ready for launch day.


It doesn't support flash.


The browser is quite nice to use, but it takes far too long to render a page even on wifi, and the address bar also vanishes in landscape mode, why? It's locked to having to use bing to search, forcing you to either manually go to google or download a google search app which needs to be accessed separately to the browser, very poor show.


No multitasking. If you're writing an email or a text and want to check something in the middle of it, well you can forget it because that message will be gone when you come back.


Forced to use bing maps, which is dire. No satnav.


No custom ring tones or messages - apple are bellends for imposing this as it stands, there really is no excuse for ms to have adopted this bizarre limitation.


Basically Microsoft have decided that they want a piece of the apple pie (ho ho ho) and have put on their doppleganger underpants. They've decided that people want a closed apple style os, and that must be the secret to apples success. The problem for them is that they've stepped into the arena with all of the arrogance of apple, but with absolutely none of the backing or content. The Nokia deal is supposed to beef this up but apparently we won't be seeing anything from them for about two years, by which time I think this os will be utterly obscure.


I love me xbox though - pew pew pew!


Apple - The iphone is a fantastic device, it really does have some viable games too. You can say what you will about it but there's no denying that the iphone just works, it does pretty much everything that you would need it to and it's all wrapped up in a nice contained little package. My problem though is that it has had the exact same user interface since day one, and it has become extremely boring to look at. What good is releasing a new hardware design when you haven't touched the look of the os, ot even allow customisation?


Also as I've said, itunes is a vile and cruel punishment.
 
I can't say about iPhone, since I own a Sony Ericsson.


My previous phone was an Ericsson and it was AWESOME and good looking, that's why I wanted to keep going with Ericsson.


Well, it was a wrong move, I got the Aino, you know the "feature phone" that can connect to your PS3 like a PSP through 3G or Wifi?


It's slow, unbearably slow: it lags when I go from the main screen to the main menu, or to the calendar and event to the phone book…


Conclusion, I'll probably get an iPhone next year.


Since my main computer is a mac, it'll be easier than buying another brand…


And for the "games & geeky hacking", I'll hopefully have my pandora
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Oh and just a last thing about iTunes, it seems to only work relatively well on os X.


Maybe it's a marketing system for Apple to convince people into buying their computers?
 
I try to don't hate or love companies just for the shake of it, like some people loves Apple and therefore hates MS.


From my experiences all 3 companies make mistakes. Huge mistakes they shouldn't do, taking in account how expensive are their products. My 3 examples:


- MS: My Xbox got the Ring of Death after a year. Good side is MS replaced the motherboard, paid for the transport and gave me 1 month free in Xbox Live. I just had the hassle of not having the console for 2 weeks.


- Apple: I bought one of the early MacBooks (bought just the day after they released it). After 1 year and a half, the keyboard case has yellowed completelly. Apparently they only replaced it meanwhile on warranty, so I missed my opportunity for months. No good.


- Sony: I bought a PS3 and paid for the PSN+. Now the entire PSN is down since more than a week becase a hacker's attack using a known security exploit. Worse, all my personal details may have been compromised. I had to cancel my VISA just in case.


As I said, nothing to hate/love them, but I think companies like that should avoid having those kind of problems.
 
Microsoft is a money-grubbing, no-good company with terrible leadership and no ethics whatsoever. It must stick its hand into everything, and if it is not No. 1 straight away, it dumps its infinite supply of money into eliminating the competition until it is No. 1 by default. It is the epitome of what makes capitalism unfeasible in this modern age.


On the plus side, they made the Kinect, which has been cracked by the open-source community and used for the betterment of humanity, such as allowing one to generate giant statue-gods of oneself in Minecraft.

But no matter how much they suck, they're not nearly as evil as Apple.


BURN THE APPLES!


But Kinect didn't need cracking... I just installed some drivers on my computer and presto, I'm controlling it with my Kinect :D


On another note, you can use it to make a giant statue-god of yourself in Minecraft?! DO TELL!
 
so pretty much after reading through this whole thread, i summarized it in my first post, no?
 
^Not really, I like my macbook and wouldn't even consider going back to crappy laptops from other makers
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I like / dislike these companies for completely different reasons. I'm a developer and have to deal with the development tools they provide us with. Anyway, here goes:


Sony:


I have a bit of a love / hate relationship with their consoles. Sony loves to engineer their own quirky hardware with a bunch of asymmetric processors and what not. Very hard to get into and poses significant problems when trying to develop cross platform software. The SPU's in the PS3 are REALLY fast (woohoo!), but actually leveraging all that power poses significant restrictions on engine design. Then there's the software side of things. Overall it's OK, but when you're trying to chase down a bug in an SPU module, it can get really frustrating. Things like sometimes not being able to inspect variables or callstacks, DMA transfers failing for no apparent reason, no hardware exceptions, so if you're reading misaligned data, you've got your work cut out for you. On top of that, the GCC compiler is really strict and template support is pretty bad.


Nintendo:


The Wii development kit sucks. It doesn't have a network debug connection, but rather, it uses 3 USB cables and a serial cable. That means that only one developer can use a devkit at a time. On top of that, their compiler lacks some very basic optimizations like baking out constant data in the data sections (instead it runs constructors for just about everything that isn't plain old data like floats and ints). They also have some type differences in their std headers, which can be really frustrating, they want forward declarations for all non static functions, the debugger is unstable, and the list goes on and on.


Microsoft:


This is by far the BEST console to develop for. Nice symmetric triple core console with full access to all memory, beefy vector units, the best development tools on the planet (Visual Studio) and really good debugging / profiling tools.


Apple:


You need a Mac to develop for the iPhone / iPad. This kinda sucks as all the consoles above (and most other prev gen consoles) all have a windows based development environment. So as a multi platform shop, this adds another box + monitor to your setup. As if I didn't have enough stuff on my desk already (2 monitors, 1 TV, 1 PS3 devkit, 1 xbox360 devkit and a PC). Now I also need a mac. Sigh. Same story here, only 1 mac can talk to the target hardware. In this case it's not too big a deal as iphones and ipads are dirt cheap. A ps3 devkit sets you back about $20.000 for example. I'm sure those prices have come down a bit, but in the beginning that's what they went for.


So if I had to choose, I'd choose the xbox 360, even though from a consumer point of view Microsoft can be 'evil', for developers this is the single most streamlined development platform available to date.
 
For me I love them because their platforms have tons of games but I hate them because I only have so much free time and they each have their own console taking up space in my life.


Right now I have two systems I play games on, and only two, not time in my life for more: My Pandora and my DSiXL. I find I have more time to play on the go than when I'm at home so they're a good option for me.


I could go into why I like these 3 companies for thinks like input devices or hate them for money-grubbyness but for me that is all irrelevant, portability and simplicity is just so much more important to me.
 
I like / dislike these companies for completely different reasons. I'm a developer and have to deal with the development tools they provide us with. Anyway, here goes:...

Oh cool! Who do you dev for?
 
The funny thing is that all these companies are "evil". Heck, all big companies are since they do what they can to guard their own possessions and use lobbyists to make new terrible laws and what not. Apple do what they can to restrict the market so you have to choose sides. Microsoft does the same, just not as forcefully. Also, Microsoft got Balmer who scares the living daylight out of me. SONY helped make sure pawnshops in Japan may not legally sell second hand electronic devices and gadgets.


So, the fault is not really the companies, but the business culture and those who enforce it. Who enforce it? Well, we do; by voting the wrong way when voting for governments, by buying products from companies which are "evil", by not educating ourselves before making decisions, by putting the blame of our own stupidity on companies/governments. Only we can change it! Are you behind me! Raise your fists! It is time we make some changes! Viva la Revolution Synthetica Electronica!


Well, buying an OpenPandora is a good start =)
 
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