Daring Fireball links to a perfectly classic example of someone attempting to divine the reasons why things are the way they are, armed with nothing but whining and a half-baked conspiracy theory. It is, of course, from Gizmodo:
The only question is, will Apple offer its in-app brightness control as an API for developers or will it keep it for itself, in hopes that the subconscious effect on readers will somehow translate into increased book sales? Only Jobs knows.
So Apple is not letting third-party developers control screen brightness in their apps, thereby giving themselves market advantage. Harsh accusation. Except:
UPDATE:The Kindle app indeed has a brightness control. It is buried under the font adjustment menu option.
Here’s a story which may or may not be true; all I can promise is that it was told by an Apple engineer.
When the original iPhone came out, it featured a sleek, recessed headphone jack. It worked great… as long as you used the included Apple headphones. Most other headphones couldn’t plug in; the port was just too narrow.
And the Internet was ablog and atweet with rants and theories about how this was a greedy scam by Apple. See, they want to lock you into their headphones. Surrender dein Freiheit to Der Apfel. Except of course you got the headphones with the iPhone, so it’s not clear what exactly the gain to Apple would be.
What the Apple engineer said was that the iPhone was, as we all know, a super-top-secret project. The team worked on it in isolation, and it was really not until well into the final design that someone pointed out they couldn’t plug their Sonys into the jack. Believe it or not, they don’t have too many pieces of non-Apple gear in the design labs.
If this is true, it certainly betrays a lapse in Apple’s famed detail-orientededness. But that is different than malicious intent on their part. It is much, much easier and safer to be wrong than to be evil.
