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The Apple Two
theodp writes "Over at Slate, Tim Wu argues that the iPad is Steve Jobs' final victory over Steve Wozniak. Apple's origins were pure Woz, but the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad are the products of the company's other Steve. Jobs' ideas have always been in tension with Woz's brand of idealism and openness. Crazy as it seems, Apple Inc. — the creator of the personal computer — is leading the effort to exterminate it. And somewhere, deep inside, Woz must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists."
I'm pretty sure Woz came to terms with that realization decades ago. He hasn't had a say in any of Apple's higher level decisions since his plane crash in 1981, and he hasn't worked for them at all since 1987. He probably doesn't even think of it as "his" company anymore (if he ever really did). The guy has done a lot of cool stuff since then, and is probably way more interested in talking about his more recent engineering diversions (like his attempts to get Toyota's attention about their accelerator problems) than discussing the philosophy of a company he left behind when The Bangles were still Walking Like an Egyptian.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Even the market? Wow. I never knew that.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
"The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists."
Since we're talking about competing philosophies rather than the destruction of the entire company, and further given that there's been no press releases declaring the death of Woz's ideals, i'm not sure that word means what you think it means.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
As hard as it is to believe, Apple has actually managed to make Microsoft look like a more open company. You have more freedom, at a far lower price, when dealing with Microsoft than you do when dealing with Apple.
Frankly, I never thought we'd see the day where just being able to run the applications you wanted to run was a "feature" of a given operating system and platform. But here we are, with Apple dictating exactly which applications are acceptable, and exactly which ones aren't, based on fuzzy and secretive criteria.
I have to give a big "Fuck You" to anyone who supports Apple, or any company like Apple, but buying their products and encouraging their hideous business model. You people are the scum of the earth, and enemies of freedom.
From reading the article, I only see that the company moved into a different direction to a closed platform away from the hacker ideals of Woz. Big deal. How is that a "victory"?
Apple is a public company and they have to run it as a business to create a return to the stockholders. I don't know of any company that has been able to do that catering towards hackers.
Jobs is taller than Woz. That "victory" has as much validity and meaning as the changing ideals.
This ridiculous hype makes me want to throw up. Can we please introduce a rule where we can have only one article that mentions the iPad per day?
Single dumbest post I have seen on slashdot in 10 years.
A personal computer is a computer that _does what you want it to do._ For a shockingly large number of people, Apple's present product line does exactly that, which explains their present high popularity and booming market share, especially among consumer media devices.
Back in Woz's day, it was important to have a BASIC interpreter on your personal computer, but not because it made the computer more "open" in some vague ideological terms. It was important because that was how a lot of useful computer software was transmitted. As a kid I remember typing in BASIC source listings from computer magazines for things like games and other cool stuff. Of course I also learned to write my own software, but nowadays there are about a million different ways of doing that. It sucks that Apple won't let you have a sandboxed Logo or Python interpreter on your iDevice, but it doesn't mean that the device is somehow not "personal."
For better or for worse, the walled garden is the future of consumer electronics. It's good for security, good for the consumer, and not so good for tinkerers. But don't make the mistake of assuming that means the computer isn't "personal" anymore.
So if you change your name, you're a completely new person?
this post is just plain BS - Apple didn't 'create' the PC - the PC was created by Alan Kay.
Woz was pushed out by Jobs very early on, actually right after the Apple II. never since has he influenced Apple in any way.
Apple has always been a walled garden, built on hype & ignorance.
As they mention in TFA, even toasters and other appliances have screws on the back; you can take it apart and do what you want with it. If you want to see how all your appliances work, you can take them apart and put them back together. Replacing parts in your toaster might be beyond most people, but for those few who can do it, they are able to. Desktops, laptops, and most mobile internet devices have screws as well. I can replace the hard drive and upgrade RAM even in my little netbook. Apple's products are pretty much unique in being completely locked down.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I love how "Apple's computer-accessory devices are fairly closed" is somehow the opposite of "Apple makes general purpose computers". As though it were impossible to make both a fully programmable, general-purpose, use-any-way-you-like piece of computer equipment and also make computer equipment that has a more limited function and is vendor-locked.
Seriously, get a grip. Apple isn't even pretending that the iPad is a replacement for a general-purpose computer, and more than AT&T is pretending their smartphones are replacements for general-purpose computers. Until someone suggests that Apple will stop selling general-purpose computers it's INSANE to say that the iPad represents a fundamental change in the way anything works. (And we'll totally ignore the relatively small portion of the general-purpose computer market that Apple makes up).
Heck, if you want to complain about vendor-locked, dumbed-down hardware you should take a look at the last 20 years of cell phones. Cellular providers have consistently killed features and interoperability on their handsets for decades and the show no signs of stopping anytime in the future. Compared to the rest of the mobile-data ecosystem the iPad is one of the most open platforms available.
Being able to install the video player of my choice on a Mac is not "tinkering".
This is the sort of nonsense BS mentality that the column was talking about. The Apple cult is in a rush to give up any sort of liberty for a little bit of shininess. It's not even any more shininess than they can get with any more open Apple product. They're just eager to buy into because it is the new and current thing. They're willing to throw out everything else in the process.
So now we have an interesting new definition of "geek".
Installing Plex or VLC doesn't make me any more of a "geek" than selecting the Facebook app in the app store.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The iPad is so last weekend. Can we find another story already?
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
As far as I know, Apple dropped "trusted" computing support in 2006. They dropped DRM for iTunes in 2009. And of course MacOS X is based on FreeBSD and major portions of the OS are open source.
So the fact that they make a few completely closed products doesn't fully characterize their entire culture of openness vs. closedness. The truth is more complicated. I am no Apple fanboi (I'm a Ubuntu fanboi) but I consider MacOS to be a lot more "open" than Windows, in some ways at least. For instance, MacOS ships with development tools.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
He likes the iPad
Of course he likes the iPad. The iPad is actually a lot like the original Apple computers in terms of what it's trying to do. Steve Jobs is actually trying to push a whole new category. (Not wholly new, but one that's only been obscure so far.) He's pushed things so far, that there is no current killer app for this device. It's just like the advent of the original Apple, when everyone was saying that it was very cool, but what the heck is it good for? It wasn't until later that VisiCalc became the killer app.
Steve Jobs and company have gone out so far on a limb, we don't quite know what to do with this thing. I've coined a new unit: the milliTaco. It's 1000th of the innovation required to make a game changer and confuse a Slashdot editor. With the iPod, it wasn't the features and stats, the killer was the legal music download ecosystem they created. With the iPad, it's the ability to interact with a networked computer in ways and situations that we haven't before, without looking like a total dork:
http://amzn.com/B001G713NO
The killer apps are yet to come, for those of us who see the potential in this thing to implement.
Though, I can't imagine using it as my only computer as a student, blech
Well, duh! That's not what it's for!
They are for people with other things to do.
The idea you need to be able to build or program a computer in order to use one is as dead as disco.
Steve Jobs was always obsessed with what Bill Gates had / was. Which is why Apple is what it is today. Closed and controlling.
I like Apples products, I just hate the dictatorship them impose on them. That is all a product of Steve Jobs. Once he is gone, hopefully Apple will become more customer choice friendly.
He'd have been a happier man if he had followed Gates' other traits: being a nice guy and giving tens of billions of dollars to charity.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
So, it's significant how? Oh, right, everyone in the media owns one, and just can't stop yammering about how totally awesome they are for, like, media stuff and junk.
That's like Slashdotters declaring that this will be the year of Linux On The Netbook because we're all packing EEEs with Ubuntu remix. One swallow makes neither a summer nor a porn movie.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...can we get some more histrionics?
Apple Inc. -- the creator of the personal computer -- is leading the effort to exterminate it.
WTF are you talking about? "Exterminate?" Apple is somehow preventing me from going to amazon and ordering the parts for a new gaming PC? Are they run by Daleks now? Or I could go to Xilinx and get a demo board with an FPGA containing PPC processors and Ethernet cores. Now *that's* hardcore, baby. ;-)
This all makes me want to buy an iPad to help the product line have a long life because the reactions it is causing amongst the self appointed Guardians Of Us All are absolutely hilarious.
While a computer you can modify might not sound so profound, Wozniak contemplated a nearly spiritual relationship between man and his machine.
I owned an Apple II. It was neat. There was, however, nothing religious or spiritual about the experience. It played games and I did some word processing and my first programming. It was a device. Period. Anything else is self important wankery by people seeking to fill a void in their lives by walking some imaginary One True Path of computer knowledge. Computers are handy state machines, not a relationship.
Seriously, the reactions of many guys like this is very religious. Oh no, our private club has been invaded by heretics and icky girls who break away from our precious canon and prayer books! Do they not tinker? Do they not want to spend their entire weekend setting jumpers and modifying power cables? What is this "life" of which they speak? Blasphemy!
... revolutionary... establishment... anti-establishment... counterculturals...
And on and on and on. Get out your buzzword bingo cards, Cartman- long haired hippy edition!
The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.
Oh noes! You mean things change and evolve? Damn! And here I was hoping my fancy new HDTV has tubes I could take down to the corner soda shoppe and run through the tester. 2^5 Skidoo!
I recall when I went from a radio kit I built myself to a store bought fully assembled receiver. Or when I went from a printer interface box I hacked to make work with my computer, to a plug and play printer. While I am as capable of as much romanticizing of the past as anyone else, there is always a new product to build, so I do not have to whine about how the good old days are gone.
In this case the GPC is evolving and there is no reason why it can't be replaced by something else. Many of us do not have stand alone Hi Fi stereos in our house, hand built of otherwise. Many of us do not have stand alone VCR or DVD players in our house. We might have one to rip DVDs, but generally the content is on a stream. The purpose of Apple was to replace old stuff with better new stuff, in the case at the time a terminal with a stand alone computer. Many people mistake this replacement for an open system with a closed system, and in part the power of Apple was that one had access to the CPU itself. But the real power of the Apple was that everyone could have a computer, even if they were not able to get a mainframe. The power of the Mac was that everyone could use a computer even if they did not know how to use a command line, though not everyone could afford it, but that is still the case. The Mac was 'closed', but that was not the point. If the iPad works, which I don't know if it will, the tablet idea has so far been a failure, it will be because hid even more complexity from the user, so that even more people can do what most people use a computer for, which is, of course, to look at p0rn, assuming the content is not in flash.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I'm a gadget guy. I've owned a lot of them, from Palms to Gameboys to iPods. The iPad doesn't really appeal to me, but I'm sure it is great for some people. My wife, for instance. She likes to knit while sitting in her recliner with her Shih Tzu on her lap, with CNN/Fox News/MSNBC/Weather Channel/whatever on TV in the background. The iPad would be the ideal tool for her to look up patterns for knitting, or if she wanted to look something up they're talking about on the news.
/. community, even though there are MILLIONS of DS's out in the wild.
/., sales for the iPad would be in the tank. This is primarily because OS X would be too cumbersome to use on the unit, and multi-tasking would be a battery killer, but also because even if Apple did fulfill most of /.'s wish list, they still wouldn't buy it because it's made by Apple.
Now all this business about hacking/tinkering/etc. I used to own a Nintendo DS Lite, and I loved it. It was a great device. I thought it would be awesome if I could download apps over the internet. It had wi-fi, but no web browser, so that was a no-go. Even if it did have a browser (Opera doesn't count since it was impossible to find), it's not like there was a memory card on which I could save downloadable apps. What if I wanted to write apps for it? Nintendo charges an arm and a leg for a dev kit, plus you have to be an already established company. I know all of these solutions are available in the homebrew/gray market, but they're few and far between, and they aren't that accessible to the common schlub. Yet, there's no moral outrage from the
Apple on the other hand allows you to register & download it's official development tools for free, gives hundreds of code examples, and provides a boatload of developer documentation. The only time you need to pay Apple is if you want to sell/share your software via iTunes, and that's a paltry $99, not the princely $10,000 sum Nintendo charges for a dev kit. If you want to load your apps that you wrote onto your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch without paying the money, then jailbreak it--it's easier than setting up your DS to use homebrew apps (not that I endorse doing it).
My guess is that if Apple did release the iPad with multi-tasking, full-blown OS X, and addressed all the other complaints we here on
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The TRS-80s post date the Apple I by a bit. The Altair took hours to assemble and cost a great deal more than most households could really afford and probably a personal computer but also not truly useful as such. The TRS-80s were also not per se personal computers they were marketed for small businesses. The Apple II really kicked off the personal computer craze followed closely by the Commodore 64 and the Atari 800. So the statement that Apple created the personal computer is more or less accurate.
Why bother
This is life, not a freakin' soap opera. Woz owns iPhones, he owns an iPad, he has iPods and macbooks and probably at least one of everything Apple ever made. Oh yeah, and he has a bootload of Apple stock that keeps him rich as God. Obviously he's bitter and cries himself to sleep every night. If that's what losing an epic geek battle looks like, bring it on...
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
The Apple 2 wasn't an open source device. Yes, you could hack together peripherals and write stuff in basic.
But other than that, there isn't some big philosophical shift in Apple's model in 1983 and today. In 2010 you need to use the app store to distribute stuff. In 1983 you have to buy dev tools and get retail shelf space. In 2010 you have DRM. In 1983 the computers weren't good enough to use DRM, so you had to use code wheels, lookup the word on page 161, line 6, word 12 in the manual and hard to photocopy code sheets. (Remember Sim City 1?)
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
posting this again, since something went wrong the first time:
this is a false dichotomy forged by suggesting that this Steve is good, ergo this steve is bad, then amplifying those traits by mapping them on to perceived standards of today.
I built and sold homebrew computers in the era when the apple II hit the market. At the time we all laughed at the apple as a "toy" because it was so locked down and not built from components. Back then, sonny, you built a computer like an Imsai, altair, cromenco, by starting with a metal box, putting in a non-switiching power supply, choosing the largest capacitors you could fit in the box, then an s-100 (altair) buss. then you picked a cpu board from one manufacturer, some memory cards from another, a keyboard uart decoder from another, a keybaord from another, a video card, and a TV screen modded with an RF converter on channel 4.
These apples were hideously locked down. Switching powersupplies with just wires coming out of a metal box, no way to ugrade the capacity and very little excess capacity. the keyboard was integrated into the case ! and wholly shit a mother board with soldered in chips, video, meomery, and CPU.
Even the address space of the cards you plugged in was decoded on the motherboad not the cards (which allowed the cards to be smaller than the ones for the S-100 bus). THe cards even got regulated voltages not raw rectified AC.
they sucked all the flexibility out of it.
the software was essential to the operation of the hardware not separate from it: a lot of the video management was done in software. the timing one the disk drives they put out used soft sectors not hardware determined sectors (only one hole punched in the floppy instead of 20, one for each sector). Even the memory refresh was handeled on the video updates which in turn were backsided on last half of the 6502's instruction cycle (when it would not be fetching). It was one of the very first systems to successfully use dynamic memory. (Only a fool would not use static memory in an altair, since you had to do all the refresh handling on the memory card).
You had to buy apple floppy disks, and apple plug-in cards for many things cause they were not standard cards or drives.
And of course the apple II in hind sight was one of the most geniuous machines ever built. it's lock downs let hobbiest's soar in other directions. plug in cards were small and the pre-decoded addresses and regulated voltages let you put all your effort into what they did rather than barely getting them to work. the dynamic memory allowed cheaper larger address spaces and the standardization of the video (all apples had to have the same video card) meant all games written would work on all apples. the same was not true of the others' since every s-100 bus machine had some different video card standard.
the use oif software decoding of keyboards and disks and so forth introiduced an era that eventually led to the apple desk top bus in the macintosh. What a brilliant simplication. Now we of course have USB instead of different ports for keyboards, parallel printers, scsi drives, tablets, mice.... But the only reasons we went down that track was Woz's apple paved the way. by making so much of the hardware immutable, the software could rely on standard configurations in every machine and thus software timing of other events became reliable for the very first time.
so this is BS revisionism to say that Woz was all about openness and Jobs all about lock down.
What it was both. lock downs of previously unlocked down things created growth to build on. you were not constantly re-inventing the wheel from scratch. In case you have not noticed it before the thing that makes apples great is they always are expensive: this is because they spec them out at high levels using fewer but a complete set of advanced components even on base models. This means software can always count on a feature being there and thus not shoot for the lowest common denominator. think back to pre-w
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've used Macs (and Apple II's) my whole life and I have always dealt with this nonsense from people. I upgraded and Apple IIci to a Mac that was more powerful than Apple's base Mac in 1997. Using 3rd party hardware. In may cases we have been able to swap out logic boards - its just cheaper to buy a new computer. In the late 90's you could swap out the CPU! Desktop Macs have always been upgradable and expandable. Different story for laptops, but you could always put in more RAM and a bigger harddrive. About the only thing a Mac user could do *with ease* is build a Mac from scratch. But the typical Mac user would want to do this anyway. The core of the Apple solution is off the shelf, plug it in, and it just works.
I am on a 3 yr old MacBookPro right now that is just fine snf speedy. My iPhone is 2 yrs old. My media Mac Mini is 4 yrs old, my second media Mac mini is 5 yrs old. Even my iBook G3 that is dedicated to playing music in the living room is 7 years old. All of them run fine. And only the non-intel ones are not running the latest OS (but they run the latest iTunes, Quicktime, and other apps that matter). Cost per hour of use without upgrading is far superior than those other platforms.
And best yet, on my Intel Macs I can run OS X, Windows, and Linux - all at the same time. FInd me a Linux user or Windows user who can do that. Off the shelf.