Recently I had a client with a Mac and an HTC smart phone, trying to connect the two and not succeeding. She was most annoyed and claimed she had bought the HTC because she didn’t like Apple ‘forcing her to buy their products to be compatible’. She loved her MacBook Pro and she loved her HTC and she demonstrated a few of it’s features that iPhones didn’t have, like the ability to enlarge text message by pinching. A pretty cool feature for one such as me with short sight.
We attempted to connect her phone to the Mac with the software that HTC provides without much luck. With Samsung phones and tablets a similar experience occurs: the software that these companies provide isn’t very good, in fact it is abysmal, useless for all practical purposes.
But what interested me was that to her it was Apple’s fault! They should do something about this inability to connect seamlessly. I wondered about this when she had left, unsatisfied with the inability to use her choice of smartphone with her choice of computer.
Is it the commonly held belief that so permeates the tech media that Apple products only work with Apple and that we are held in a ‘walled garden’ by them that cause this impression? Actually if you connect an iPhone to a PC you can use it quite happily. Apple provide iTunes for PCs and everyone is happy. The photos transfer into the PC easily as well I am told.
The main difference is that Apple have provided proper software for their iPhones to connect to PCs. Samsung and HTC haven’t done the same for Macs and I wonder why. There are heaps of Mac users using their brand of phone who would like to use them as simply as iPhone users do, but if they go to the maker’s website and find relevant software – the basic way to resolve an issue like this – they find only very limited programs that work so badly that its obvious the manufacturers don’t really care. But the device owners aren’t apparently complaining to Samsung and HTC, they bad mouth Apple wanting them to fix the problem!
I reckon this is the default response to an issue: blame the guy you are told is causing the problem rather than thinking it through and demanding better software from the guy who makes your device. I would much prefer it if we could use any phone or tablet with our Macs, strength in diversity I say!