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The Genius In Apple's Vertical Platform
Precision found a nice little piece of speculation on the real reason behind Apple's recent efforts to restrict app development to XCode. While the standard given reason is to kill competition from Flash and other stacks, this story speculates that the real reason has to do with the unusually large die size of the A4 processor inside the iPads. Worth a quick read.
I think the article is absolute nonsense. The A4 has been "disassembled" and it is consistent with an ARM single core.
It would make sense... If it wasn't filled with nonsense. The larger die? It's because the system RAM is built into the chip. Not because it's running some new dual core design. Apple banned writing in another language. Not compiling using anything but XCode. Some of the converters out there will covert down to Objective-C and then compile them with XCode. With his speculation in the article, that should be fine (because it's compiling with their compiler, and should be the exact same as if written in O-C in the first place), but it's banned. I do agree that it is well written. But well reasoned? It starts with a pair of flawed premises, and then makes some pretty good reasoning based on them. But all of that reasoning is inherently flawed due to the flawed premise.
What bothers me, is that people who don't know any better will read this article and think "Woah, cool! They are doing something smart!" when it's all really unjustified based on his reasoning (I'm not going to comment on if it really is smart or not)...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good