Slashdot Mirror
Apple's Trend Away From Tinkering
theodp writes "Having cut his programming teeth on an Apple ][e as a ten-year-old, Mark Pilgrim laments that Apple now seems to be doing everything in their power to stop his kids from finding the sense of wonder he did: 'Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world. With every software update, the previous generation of "jailbreaks" stop working, and people have to find new ways to break into their own computers. There won't ever be a MacsBug for the iPad. There won't be a ResEdit, or a Copy ][+ sector editor, or an iPad Peeks & Pokes Chart. And that's a real loss. Maybe not to you, but to somebody who doesn't even know it yet.'"
What makes computers great are their flexibility - it's an entire world to discover to someone young and new. Are we going to be in the insane situation where our children will need to dust off the old C64 from half a century ago just to learn the basics for themselves?
If all you've got is locked content on locked machines, you end up with mind firmly locked shut.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
But Mac OS X comes with development tools right on the install CD. How expensive (or difficult, back before bit torrent) it was to get a development environment up and running on Windows was what drove me to Linux and I'm pleased that Apple make it so easy to get programming tools on your Mac.
For a long time I was on the fence about Apple. I liked their strong sense of making sure everything works
But then I encountered their users, snobby idiots really. Although it was not because they used Apple, more that those with a specific profession tend to use Macs
Recently I havent liked Apple because of their DRM and crazy control they have over their products and markets. I mean IPods that you cant change the battery in? WTF!
Now yet another reason I dont like Apple, these guys dont seem to realize what they are doing, stagnating their own products by being jackasses about their products.
I have distantly wanted a Mac, just to toy with it... but why? No reason anymore.
I'm someone else who cut my teeth PEEKing and POKEing on Commodore and Sinclair machines. Hell, there were even magazines with "tricks-n-tips" for useful locations and what values would create what effects. Nowadays I suspect they'd just get sued under DMCA provisions for reverse engineering :-(
Yes, a sad time indeed.
It was nice to be able to tinker with early Apples because there were few alternatives. But as much as I enjoy a good rant against Apple, I fail to see the problem. Buy your kids something else. Either he thinks the latest Apple SHINY is more important than his child's opportunity to get under the hood or he doesn't, and there are (or soon will be) numerous alternatives that are not as tightly locked. Life is about decisions and trade-offs.
I think this is just a natural evolutionary process for most new technology. When personal computers were new, they were mainly purchased and used by hobbyists. Now they are mainstream and most people just want to use them to get things done, they don't care how or why they work. Cars were the same when they were first introduced. You had to know how to tinker just to keep them working. Now cars are everwhere and they are computerized and automated so much, it's hard to do the kind of tinkering that used to be common.
It's sad to see things change, but there will always be room for those who like to tinker. We still have Linux and *BSD, after all. I love my Mac, but sometimes it's nice to play around with Linux.
They just separate that audience and give them OS X. Let them play with the iPad through the SDK on it, instead of on the iPad itself.
iPads are meant for people that DON'T care about computers, but about real world activity.
It's something hackers could learn from Apple: how to make a massively technical device usable.
That was the spirit Steve and Woz began with: empower the hacker.
Why is Woz not in charge of his own high-power company? The world is not fair, I suppose.
Woz was the tinkerer, who brought the spirit of the tinkerer to Apple. Steve Jobs is the anti-tinkerer; he just wants you to shut up and buy cool looking gadgets from him on a regular schedule.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I fail to see why a kid today can't learn programming on an Apple II or a C-64 or whatever simple computer form the 80s.
While this is certainly true for the iPad, iPhone etc, it's really not true at all for OSX. OSX comes with a bunch of dev tools on the install disk, in a way that was not true way back when. Those kinds of utilities existed, but getting ahold of them was non-trivial for someone out in the boonies.
The iPad isn't a general purpose computer, although it seems like it's blurring the line a bit. Certainly no reason for doom and gloom.
I always find it a little sad when I read something like this, though. Part of the joy of those days was exploring something new and interesting, finding terra incognita... the problem is that your kids probably won't get that joy in exactly the same way, and very well may not be interested in those things at all... they are actual individuals with individual tastes and interests, not a bunch of little clones running around. It seems like every time someone goes to great lengths to recreate his precise childhood for his kids, it's just doomed to failure, just because they're kids. Unpredictable.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
in machine language...
Few people want to play at that level any more and few need to. Most want to create really cool apps and for them access to the GUI is enough. Heck, C isn't taught in many schools any more.
But if a kid wants to play at low level, there are $25 or less offers on the web for the computers of yore. Or they can start reading code..it isn't like lots isn't available. And even for most OSS, the docs are so much more than the manufacturers manuals were in the 60s.
In the 50's and 60's hobby electronics was a huge thing - it was common to see people tinkering in their basements. It might still exist now in some manner, but it's far, far less popular and most people just want to come back from the store with an amplifier or radio that "just works".
It's the same with computers. We're going through the phase now where hobbyists are lamenting that they're being "locked out of their own computers", but no more than the electronic tinkerers are locked out of their consumer electronics unless they're very good with surface mount soldering and miniaturization.
The simple fact is that 98% of people out there just want their computer to work. They don't care about getting under the hood. If it plays their youtube videos, netflix streaming content, and lets them send some emails and play the latest game they bought from Steam or Best Buy, they're happy. That's all that's needed. So a company catering to that market instead of the 1 or 2 percent who want to tinker under the hood is just good business.
Yes, it means that the kind of computing we all grew up with in the 70's and 80's will either die or come close. But that's just the standard life cycle of technologies - it happened with radios just like it's happening now with computers. It's a mistake to extrapolate our interest to the general public, which doesn't share it. Since there are 50 or 100 of them for every one of us, they form a FAR larger market, and that is the direction things will inevitably shift over time. It's a lost cause trying to argue things like "but you're locked out of your own system!!". They don't *care* - that's not what they want out of a computer. The sooner computer nerds realize that, the easier it will be to adjust to the direction the market will be moving over time.
Apple isn't out to fight people that want to 'tinker', they are just going after a different market now, the 'consumer market'. Its where the real money is to be made, and the side effect are shiny closed boxes that 'just work'.
If you still want to 'tinker', you still can, just you do it elsewhere. Give your kid a FPGA board and some books on basic logic.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I understand not reading TFA, but at least read the fucking summary. One of his issues is "With every software update, the previous generation of "jailbreaks" stop working, and people have to find new ways to break into their own computers", and I must say, I agree.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
If all you've got is locked content on locked machines, you end up with mind firmly locked shut.
Bollocks. Bullshit. Hyperbole.
I.T.'s loss is the rest of the world's gain. The less time people spend fucking around with irrelevant I.T. wheels the more time spent on the real problems and solutions of the world.
Deleted
Even Linus readily acknowledges that the world needs more than the Linux model, that the Windows and OS X can all co-exist.
And I hear people talking all the time that OS X is a joy to program for, and not particularly hard.
The iPod/iPhone/iPad is in the form factor that's best suited to appliance. That is, most (90+%) just want them to work. Where even the most polished desktop is too complicated for their tastes and task at hand. Shouldn't their demands be met? BTW, I'm not covering for DRM or the like which only serves the content provider -- just that the appliance view of things is really useful to some people.
Do we complain how the Kindle or past Nokia phones are essentially closed to the average person the same way? Why is this reserved for Apple?
Really. I taught my 45 y/o uncle how to use a computer (Windows 7), his experience to computers limited previously to ATMs. It was painful. There is so much to learn that us geeks take for granted. The computer's behavior is so seemingly arbitrary at times, as are the solutions sometimes. These people don't want a "sense of wonder", they found it in other areas already and they want to have something easy to learn and use - should they be denied entrance into the digital world because they're not geeky enough? Geez, I'm glad when I don't have to fuck around with yet another relatives beige box for once.
I hope that the open PC never goes away. But there should be room for other solutions without the endless complaining. (And yes, the steps Apple does to clamp down their devices from the users themselves, who want to explore and not through misuse, absolutely sucks and should be called on it every step of the way).
Nobody has held the device in their hands, so only speculation on how hard it will be to hack.
I suspect that their own ARM based CPU is going to be pretty close to the Cell PPC (IBM: Sony PS3) in terms of security.
It looks really cool, but I'm not going to wait 3+ years to do whatever I want with it.
What we should be doing is trying to get the DMCA overturned; It is the bane of the tinker. It's ironic because I'm guessing many of the people working on this stuff over at Apple got interested in computers because of the creativity they could express by hacking away at computers.
I should say though, that Apple is not the only company in town creating hardware, I mean honestly a lot of these articles seem to make some leap at some point about how Apple is representative of all hardware manufacturers, when I think that's just not true. They create some stylish products, people buy them, and then they miss out on hacking the hardware. If people really want the option to hack the hardware, don't buy this locked down crap. It's not like Apple is the only game in town, they live off this spotlight everyone creates for them. Just get that less stylish piece of hardware that offers tons of customization and hopefully at some point Apple will have to learn what they should be doing.
Meet new people, and kill them.
I dunno, I usually find that the people "not willing to learn the in's and out's" are the same people who aren't willing to consider Mac as an option. They want to eat their cake and have it too: they don't want a machine that is considered "easy to use" as an affront to their egos, but they don't want to spend any effort learning either.
There is also the money thing, but often as not I'll see them drop more bucks on a noisy beige box with too-small screen than they would have spent on the "low end" apple. And although there is much more variety of PC equipment, they will inexplicably end up with slower specs than the low end apple.
Of course it's not helped that the stores put the ram capacity on the sticker, but the ram speed is unmentioned. Or the raw clock rate of the cpu, but not the size of the last level cache.
Anyway, my answer is usually "get the one that feels right for you" and if pressed, tell them I have a apple because of the unix (and milled aluminum case, which although fashionable, is also comfortably rigid giving it a "not a toy" feel.). Also file vault, which windows still offers no equivalent to unless you buy the ultimate extreem mega costly edition.
If they're willing to learn the ins and outs, mac actually has a lot to offer. But if they need excel macros, Windows is the only choice: office mac doesn't have 'em. (or doesn't have vbscript or something. It's not the complete ms office product) and mac's office suite doesn't understand 'em.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Now, Apple appears to be more ideologically aligned with the "Big Brother" than the hammer thrower. While it's not quite gotten to the "Information Purification Directives" level yet ...
When Apple issues an update that turns a feature off, they've issued an "information purification directive.
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future. - Orwell
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Reading the forums alot of the apple fans don't seem to like it.
Have you considered that people that like something tend not to storm the web and write about it? Of course everyone bitching on the forums hates it... Does that mean it won't sell really well?
I personally love it. I'm a programmer, I work on Windows mostly, but Macs more and more. All I've wanted a tablet for is surfing the web, reading books, and things like that. I'm not trying to do EVERYTHING on this device. I think Apple has reached a very good balance. (I would have liked a front-facing camera for video chat, but other than that I like it.)
Tens of millions of people play farmville or watch hulu and you can't do any of that on the ipad.
Uh huh. Until Hulu switches to HTML5 video embeds and Farmville writes their app in a standard format, like JavaScript + HTML5 canvas.
Fuck Flash.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
It's sad that jailbreaking is now considered normal by so many.
You shouldn't have to hack into a machine that you own just in order to be able to use it. It's not normal. It's not natural.
To have to download a grey-market third party hack just so you can install Java... do you never stop and think "What the fuck am I doing?" or "Do I really have to do this?"
I really cannot get my head around the mindset of the jailbreaker who despises the restrictions imposed by the manufacturer but still votes for those restrictions with his wallet.
If the restrictions are so bad, why don't you just stop fighting the manufacturer, and buy something that doesn't need to be "jailbroken" in order to be useful?
You're an immobile computer, remember?
I agree with everything you say except the part about personal computers programming being more complicated today than it was in 1982. You are not remembering what a PITA programing was back in 1982. In 1982, you either programmed a personal computer in BASIC or assembly language. You didn't do anything that needed to run very fast in BASIC, and writing a useful program in assembly with 48K or RAM (if you were lucky) was not trivial. Granted, expectations were much lower back then, and yes, back then I understood the machine down to the gate level. So while computers are much, much more complex today then they were 28 years ago, I actually find them much, MUCH easier to program due to the availability of very powerful programming tools.
Most awesome phone ever. Completely open, runs a very normal Linux distro, and you can "apt-get install" stuff on it.
No jailbreaking needed, the terminal is one of the applications in the default installation, and you can install SSH.
"should they be denied entrance into the digital world because they're not geeky enough?"
should they be denied entrance into the medical world because they're not willing to do med school?
should they be denied entrance into the world of classic cars because they're not willing to spend their weekends cleaning, fixing and polishing?
should they be denied entrance into the team sports world because they're not willing to shower with other people?
there are a lot of barriers to entry in just about everything we do. And these days the barriers to getting a windows box online and working are very very low. If you haven't been able to get yourself up yourself or pay someone to do it for you, then yes you don't really deserve to be online.
maybe it's because I'm in silicon valley, but a homeless many gave me his email address earlier this week. I dunno if I'm supposed to give him job tips, or just chat with him or what. so the barrier to enter the digital world is not a monetary barrier, at least not in my country where impoverished people live better than the middle class of other nations.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
When Apple decides that there will be no third-party development on Mac without a $100 developer key, we will be reliably informed that this is actually a great thing because it benefits the integrity of the platform against viruses and trojans. When Apple decides that all Mac software will have to be distributed through their App Store with their approval, we will again be informed that this will help to ensure that all software for Mac is of the highest quality.
No matter what Apple does, no matter how heavily their platforms are locked down, their users will be telling us that Mac is still a great platform for everything that anyone could possibly want to do.
It's hard to get people to leave a cult because (1) they've invested a lot of money and time in it, (2) all their friends are still in it, and (3) they are happy. The only thing that would make them happier is if you joined too. So, stop whining and buy a Mac, I guess, because who cares about freedom anyway.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
Ironic that this company once ran an ad based on Orwell's 1984 where Apple decries totalitarian control.
When one understands the nature of projection, which is where we attribute to others the behaviors and characteristics we can't see or can't accept about ourselves, one then starts to be able to see expressions like Apple's famous "1984" commercial as the most revealing indicators of the character of and the most reliable predictors of the future behavior of the speaker.
;-)
Projection isn't an occasional occurrence; it's the way the ego functions. It's always operative. Every ego-driven activity - an observation, a statement, an action - one makes is a projection.
It's true in personal relationships (both on the low side and the high side, it's how people fight and how people fall in love) and in group relationships (read any pronouncement from any country about their enemy and one knows exactly what's true about the country making the accusation).
The important tell is the amount of emotional energy in the statement. The amount of emotional energy, the reactivity, associated with an action or observation or statement is a measure of the energy the thing to which the speaker is reacting has within the speaker. So lots of short-term energy (e.g., a quick, visceral emotional response to something) or lots of long-term energy (a thing on which one spends one's time and energy, over and over) both reveal that the thing to which the speaker is reacting is unconscious to them internally - and thus is actually what runs them. The same statement made objectively and dispassionately indicates the speaker has a conscious awareness and acceptance of, and thus control over, that characteristic within them.
And because human consciousness is self-similar, projection works at every scale. It's really quite beautiful.
Some examples:
Corporations: Google's mantra of "Don't Be Evil"
Politics: Bush's demonization of Saddam Hussein as a "brutal dictator" who "hates freedom"
Nations: Israel's fear that Iran wants to "wipe their enemies off the map"
Religions: The characteristics people project onto their chosen deity (e.g., Christ's compassion and love)
Personal: What you're thinking about the writer of this comment right now.
Of course, knowing about projection is not only useful in understanding others, it's essential for learning the truth about and becoming responsible for oneself. (The classic mistake made when first learning about projection is to see it only in other people, and not apply it to oneself: "Ha! That idiot has no idea they're projecting!" Oooooops....)
I'd say the nature of projection is one of the most helpful things I've ever learned, easily the equal of any of my technical education.
The sadly amusing thing about the "1984" commercial is how much the setting resembles a Steve Jobs presentation.
"On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984'.
Give us until 2009."
Apple provides free toolsets to developers. Yes they lock out some features. Features that if opened would prevent cell carriers, content providers, etc from supporting the device. These feature lockouts allow this conversation to occur in the first place.
For those who want to directly access the hardware, we have the *nix distros, jailbreaking, and magazines like Make. Kids will find plenty of wonder, just in different ways.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
Dtrace? Terminal? The reality is that you can do SO MUCH MORE tinkering in OSX than you ever could. Ever used OS9? Black box magic. OSX, by comparison, is like a playground....
Flash kills the battery life on my laptop. You can always tell when a simple flash animation is loaded because the browser's CPU usage goes up to 90% and the fans spin up to their highest speed. Browser crashes are far more likely on pages with flash. Safari even has its own special error message for when flash crashes it.
Apple already has a platform with the hardware necessary to run flash. It's a laptop. It costs twice as much as an iPad.
If Adobe wants Flash to run on the iPad, perhaps they should look into making it run efficiently in operating systems that aren't Windows.
Funny thing is that this seems a rather recent attitude. On any Linux related thread somebody is bound to mention that flash doesn't work well fullscreen, meaning flash is a good thing to have, and not having proper support for it is a weakness. Now when Apple fails to provide support for it, that suddenly goes away and it's suddenly "eh, flash sucks".
It's an interesting inconsistency. Even more interesting since the N900 runs on an ARM CPU as well and plays flash perfectly fine, so it's not because there's no plugin.
Doesn't have to be, it can [...]
Similarly for thermostats---firmware upgrades are hard on all thermostats, not just the $VENDOR ones.
Doesn't have to be
I trust you on that.
The point was that the problems* on Samsung TVs are TV-specific, while the problems on iPods are Apple-specific, not smartphone-specific.
(* limited to the problems named in your parent^n post; your own, and the iPod-not-particularly-loving one)
By making them unchangable the price of the overall device is lowered and the form factor can be made smaller, its a trade off, and its a trade off that consumers wanted.
Are you arguing that consumers wanted unchangeable batteries in their iPods? If so, what's your evidence? That it sold well? How do you know it wasn't because of the disk space? The Apple brand? The user interface (excluding the battery)? The battery lifetime? The rapidity and ease with which you could transfer music from your computer to your portable music player ("PMP")?
.
Oh, give me a break. Tinkerers always find new things to tinker with. I used to tinker with vacuum tube electronics, radios and TVs, before personal computers were even around. Do I blame Sony for preventing me from tinkering nowadays? Absolutely not.
It is the natural progression of humanity to turn new 'tinkerable' technology into 'non-tinkerable' commodities.
So stop trying to hold back the progression of humankind, stop whining, and encourage your kids find something new to tinker with.
And stop blaming Apple for your lack of insight.
You misappropriate the term "defective by design".
"Does not contain the features I desire" is not "defective by design".
Why don't they allow us to run multiple applications at once on the iphone and ipad, for example?
On the iPhone, due to hardware restrictions mostly. I know a little about that, I happen to be an iPhone developer. While the device is able to multi-task (and does it to a degree), I am very, very happy that it doesn't allow apps to do that. Because if it did, people would have a random number of background tasks, and on that device you simply don't have the spare ressources to ignore that. Besides, the small screen makes actual simultaneous applications impractical anyways.
If you don't know that restrictions are as much part of design as features, you need to read up on design. There's a great speech about simplicity and the tyranny of choice over on TED, I can recommend it.
Because it ruins the user experience for the average user, and this could give apple a bad rep. As a consumer i do not want to be treated like that.
Ah, you want your experience to be ruined? Not a problem, buy Microsoft, they have a guarantee on that part. :-)
Computing devices should be open, and there should be rules for that.
Why?
I'm serious. Give me a good reason apart from "because I want it".
And when you do so, please do consider that these days, practically everything aside from food and clothes has microchips inside, and could be considered a "computing device".
In fact, if microsoft pulled apple's anti-competitive tricks, then they would be sanctioned by the EU before they saw it coming.
You may not like it and I do in fact sympathize (not being able to install arbitrary software except through the App Store is one of the reasons I'll very likely not be getting an iPad) - but whatever you want to call it in your anger, I fail to see where it has anything to do with anti-competitiveness.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org