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.'"

Comments

You need to learn some more about PC history

[mjwalshe]

The APPLE ][ was much more a tinkerers machine than the PET or the TRS 80. Having 7 slots for expansion cards was a lot in those days - a cool apple was one with an after market perspex lid so you could see the cool expansion cards. No ofense this is not a insightfull comment just lame

Very much for tinkerers

[Tony]

The Apple ][ came with manuals that had the ROM listings. The ][+ (at least) had a mini-assembler built right in (Sweet-16, baby!). It had full schematics right there in the box. The default "shell" was a BASIC interpreter, fer cryin' out loud!

The Apple ][ was most definitely a tinkerer's machine.

There's a huge difference between the Apple ][ and pretty much any mainstream computer available today. The Apple ][ (and to a certain extent, the Commodore 64) was simple. Almost everything you did was related to the hardware. If you wanted to do anything but launch programs, you pretty much had to learn something about the computer, and how computers operate in general. Anyone nostalgic for those days is nuts.

Don't get me wrong. I really loved the Apple ][. (This was before the ][+ or ][e, you puppies.) I believe I am a much stronger computer geek because of it. I'd wager those who learned computing on the Apple ][ make up a good percentage of the alpha geeks today.

Computers today are far cooler than they were back then. Part of the reason is, they no longer resemble "computers" so much as they are now communications devices, or information handling devices. The downside is that kids starting out these days aren't learning about the true fundamentals of how computers work. Also, they're shielded from even the ability to tinker with them.

That's not as much of a loss as you might suppose. It's not like it'd be the old Apple ][ experience anyway.

In their defense

[Simonetta]

In their defense, personal computer programming is much more complicated than it was in 1982. The machines and the hardware is several orders of magnitude faster and denser than it was then. The basics do change.

    Don't forget that the primary reason for the existence of Apple Inc is to facilitate the orderly and systematic transfer of money from the bank accounts of bored yuppies to the account of Steven Jobs. The toys and the technology is a means to an end. Home computers started in the 1970s as toys for hackers, became business office tools in the 1980s, design and educational tools in the 1990s, and home-entertainment/communications centers in the 2000s. (..and destroying the previous industry giants in each field in the process)

  People wishing to provide for their kids the experiences that they had programming 8-bit home computers should get into Aurdino and other small-scale microcontroller-based systems. The chips are cheap. The programmers are low-cost. The assemblers and compilers are free and open-sourced. Sensors are cheap, as are LCD-character displays. Graphics LCD modules are getting cheaper, but are a long way from being cheap. Gigabyte storage of data is dirt-cheap as SD cards, but they can have a difficult learning curve. In this field, projects are often shared. Tinkering and development is encouraged. Questions, even beginning questions, get answered.

  When PCs and Macs get locked down in place, the microcontroller communities sprout up like mushrooms. This is the place for tinkerers. But, please, don't let the people at Microsoft and Apple know!

You say "jailbreak", I say "Trojan."

[Swift2001]

Every jailbreak relies on finding a way to to crash the phone and insert code. This is a bug in the system, which has to be fixed to protect legions of other users, some of whom do their banking on their iPhone -- and remember, Bruce Schneier warned people not to do their banking on Windows, because it's too easy to "insert code" on a Windows computer. The banking apps on an iPhone are inherently more secure than anything on the web, or anything accessed through IE. A jailbreak so you can put on a cool program that Apple didn't pass can also put trojans there, too. Apple isn't being unduly mean to jailbreakers. If they really want to get good at it, they can figure out what to do next. Leave the debuggers to other platforms.

And that's all that Apple's "doing" to jailbreakers. Lots of people who want to do that are still doing that. No lawsuits that I know of.

Re:It's true

[TheRaven64]

usually Apple gets interfaces near perfect

I disagree, and the usability bugs I currently have open on Apple's bug tracking system agree with me. Apple interfaces are moderately good. Pretty much everyone else's interfaces are just plain terrible. People don't buy Apple products because they're good, they buy them because they're a lot less bad than the competition.

We had that problem at university

[Sycraft-fu]

A professor (a Mac head unsurprisingly) wanted to teach a class on iPhone application development. Well of course that needs to run on Macs and we don't have any Mac labs since some of our software is Windows only and we need to purchase budget computers. I don't know what he planned to do about that, maybe buy some Macs for teaching out of his research funds. However the bigger problem, the show stopper problem, was Apple. We needed to get the SDK licenses. They sent over this ginormous contract for us to sigh. That of course had to go to the lawyers, who modified it and sent it back. Apple said "No. No modification are permitted, you sign it as it is now or you can't have it." Well, we have no authority to sign, only the lawyers can do that. They weren't going to sign it as is. So, we had to say screw that.

Now the class is being taught on Android app development. This has proved to be dramatically less problematic. The SDK runs fine on our Windows systems. It would also run on Linux or Mac systems, if needed so if we want to put it on our shell systems as well as our lab system we could. Getting the SDK was not problematic either. No contract to sign, I just downloaded it from Google's site and installed it.

Does this all matter? I dunno, all I can say is there's a class of students being taught how to develop for the Android phones, rather than the iPhone precisely because of the locked down environment. The requirement to use Mac hardware, but in particular the requirement to sign a massive contract vastly in Apple's favour killed any chance that it might be taught. We simply cannot do that.

Exaggerate much?

[aristotle-dude]

Enough with the hyperbole. Go onto any mac, navigate to /Applications/Utilities. Open up terminal and hack to your heart's content. You have access to shell scripts, ruby, python, perl and PHP. I sometimes have geektool running accessing a local PHP script that scrapes local weather information and icons for display on my desktop. All of the standard unix and GNU tools are at your disposal. Settings for the system are stored in XML .plist files. The Mac OS X will never be locked down like the iPhone OS.

I have no problem with things running on the iPhone in a sandbox as it accesses the public cellular networks. Anyone caught breaking the cellular network by installing unstable software on a jailbroken deserves to have their ass kicked to the point that they are in a hospital eating through a straw for several months. Jailbreak your non-cellular Wifi devices all you want but when you jailbreak a cellphone, you are putting lives at risk.

Devices like the iPhone and iPad are supposed to be networked appliances, not general purpose computers.

PS. Here are a few links for you since you seem to be clueless as to how to use google.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/

http://www.apple.com/opensource/

All I did was type in the following keywords into google: " Apple Open Source". I know, that is so non-obvious *sarcasm*.