> (If not, you probably don’t care about fonts, so it will be Comic Sans.)

So, you either have to have a Mac or spend >$1000 (the price of a full desktop license of Helvetica Neue) to care about fonts? Well, screw my burgeoning interest in typography. I guess I just don't care enough.

> (If not, you probably don’t care about fonts, so it will be Comic Sans.)

I love you too, Marco.

Written from my un-fancy device without Helvetica Neue.

You know... you'd think that a bunch of commenters like yourselves would be able to spot a self-aware (and brilliant) act of trollery. And I do mean that in the best possible way. Here's to you, Marco, you magnificent bastard. It obviously worked!

The annoyance is that it makes his article less effective.

It's like letting cool come before functional.

I found the bit that says "If not, you probably don’t care about fonts, so it will be Comic Sans" unnecesarily agressive and false: his post displayed completely in Droid Serif for me. I don't install Helvetica Neue or Comic Sans on my Linux machine because I don't have a license for those fonts (I guess you get one for Helvetica Neue with your copy of iOS, right?).

Comic Sans is one of the MS core fonts for the web and is free to use. Your distro probably calls the package corefonts or something. I'm guessing that Debian doesn't include it in main because it's a non-free license with respect to distribution and modification, but you certainly have permission to use it and you might even be allowed to include its glyphs in documents that you sell.

Are you sure about Comic Sans? The only information I could find from Microsoft was on their font redistribution FAQ [1] and it says

    Until recently, most fonts that include a Microsoft
    copyright or trademark notice have only been available
    as part of Microsoft products. Although some fonts 
    remain Microsoft-exclusive, a number of Microsoft fonts 
    are now available to end users, ISVs and OEMs under 
    license from Ascender Corporation. These include 
    'Verdana', 'Georgia', 'Comic Sans MS', 'Microsoft Sans 
    Serif', 'Nina', 'Tahoma', 'Wingdings', 'Webdings' and 
    'Trebuchet MS'.

Doesn't that mean that to use Comic Sans you have to negotiate with Ascender Corporation? I couldn't find anything on Ascender's website suggesting any font at all was free to use (I didn't read everything carefully though), and about the MS core web fonts specifically this page [2] makes it sounds like you need to buy a license from them to use them:

    Monotype is proud to offer the Microsoft Web Core Fonts 
    for license to software developers and hardware 
    manufacturers who want to provide a consistent web 
    browsing experience in their products.

    Please contact Monotype for more information about the 
    Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web. 

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/typography/RedistributionFAQ.mspx

[2] http://www.ascendercorp.com/catalog/microsoft/web-core-fonts...

Basically Microsoft screwed up with the license for version 2, and it's legal to redistribute and use them, at least as an end user. They changed things for later versions. There's a good amount of coverage of the legal status on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web

To the author's credit, this IS an issue specific to iOS.

I thought the use of Comic Sans for other devices was pretty funny, myself.

Well, this thread is certainly full of people completely incapable of taking a joke.

I do not have Helvetica Neue, and so I got absolutely zero value out of this article.

A simple screenshot could have fixed that, but if my lacking a certain font makes someone on the internet feel better about themselves then I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Thank you

I have the Helvetica Neue family installed, so apparently I care about fonts. What I don't care for is smug, condescending bullshit, and I didn't finish the article.

Obviously, the unwashed neckbeards not using Macbooks don't care about fonts.

Wow, people are taking this way too seriously. Great article!

Too bad the point of the article is lost due to silly platform sniping.