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History Repeats Itself — Mac & the iPad
Keith found an interesting story telling a bit about how Steve Jobs operates. It involves small teams of young engineers willing to work 90-hour weeks in total secrecy, and a complete willingness to throw away bad ideas without flowery language. The iPad is surprisingly similar to the Mac."
Does that mean it's about as useful as a BOAT ANCHOR!?
I think Grossman gets it right in the last paragraph of his Time article.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
You mean like a cult?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That the state of consumer technology has caught up to Steve's ambition. Could it be that we are on now finally able to realize the 'magical' devices that Steve has had knocking around in his head these past few decades? Perhaps. Or maybe Steve is just a really lucky guy. ---or he is just a genius.
From TFA: "It was Steve's vision that if you made every single computer with the same exact OS and the same amount of memory, developers would always have a fixed platform for which to develop, making their jobs easier."
I've always been of the opinion that this is one the 'advantages' of the dominance of Windows. If you're a small development house cranking out applications, you only need to make a Windows version and you've got a big chunk of the market - The dominance of windows makes "the job easier."
Let's conveniently leave out any mention of OS 9, NeXT Step, and the fact that for a while it looked like Apple was going the way of the Dodo.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Oh please, Apple has come out with some Spiffy stuff.
The I-Pad is a Vanilla offering undeserving of the apple moniker..
And no, I'm no Mac Fan.
If you are no mac fan, why do you use the phrase "undeserving of the apple moniker"?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The iPad has everything that any other computer has...so who is to say that it is not a computer? Apple can market it as a "media device" all they want, but if people want to use their iPads in other ways, they should be allowed to do so. Nobody, not Apple, and certainly not Steve Jobs, should be dictating what people are allowed to use their iPads for (except perhaps as a deadly weapon).
The iPad does not need to "mute" anyone, as the Time article puts it. Apple is dictating that it should, because of their desire to do business with book publishers.
Palm trees and 8
No, no, no...
You went one generation too far.
The iPad is surprisingly similar to the Lisa.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The fact that Company X makes a closed system is nothing new, nor is it noteworthy. Closed systems are a dime a dozen.
What the blogs are on fire about, and what we ALL should be worried about, is a closed developer ecosystem. It's Apple's new focus, and if it's allowed to propagate to the open platform we're all screwed.
You don't get it.
They work 90 hours and then they work a totally secret amount of extra hours.
A giant customized Starbucks in Cupertino California where lattes and no soy skim macchiatos are given out free to all employees. The background music involves a playlist of Nora Jones, David Matthews, John Mayer, and Bono on loop from an Ipod docked somewhere in the Apple/Starbucks facility. Hours are long but morale is surprising high as developers, hardware and software, are given 30 minute breaks to masturbate to the new itunes interface.
All developers sit at cafe type tables with a Mac Book Pro while their lord and master Steve Jobs stands deskless in his predictable attire of a turtleneck and jeans. In fact, this is the preferred (mandatory) dress code at Apple. Jobs walks around to each and every department, separated by latte and vegan preferences, and checks on the performance and efficiency of his developers. At any given point in the day one may see Mr Jobs yelling at a programmer for not implementing a button in the perfect shade of corn flower blue (#6495ED) and immediately sends him to the apple punitive chamber, consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.
There are 2 software development departments and 2 hardware development sections in Apple. For software there is the Apple core team, Apple Open Source team. In hardware there is the Apple systems and management team and the iDevice team. Since the OSX kernel consists of a BSD darwin kernel there is no real need for low level programmers and as such the entirety of the Apple core team consists of UI designers and photoshop junkies. All software churned out from the core team is designed in a program strikingly similar to Visual Studio's form designer but with Cocoa Objective C generated instead. The 16 hour day (Jobs demands 16 hour days since he himself never sleeps) of a core dev involves lining up the right shade of chrome with the latest photoshopped graphite button and maintaining the correct color scheme, not an easy job at all.
The Apple open source team involves a little bit more coding, which is mandated to be done in TextEdit or the option of a $80 third party mac text editor. The Apple open source team doesn't actually create much code but searches the internet for interesting BSD licensed software and modifies it as it's own through obfuscation and conversion to objective C. Many of the items a mac user sees comes from the open source world stamped by apple such as the ability to play music taken from 67 different originally linux based players, CD burning, and the overall ability to click a mouse. Apple's legal department has no qualms about this practice and has assured many that since most of the code is BSD and if any is GPLed many Linux hippies should be grateful that Apple fostered WebKit by using KHTML and adding some Gecko bloat. Perhaps one of the most important items that the open source team has done to date is use parts of the FreeBSD to keep the kernel up to date.
There's not much to say about the Apple systems and management team. I suppose they can be classified in to desktop and laptop systems. Because hardware work is beneath Apple in general and thought of being only worthy of Windows Users and as such can be found working on these beauties in the starbucks bathroom. Desktops are currently made by buying dell machines and putting them in Lian Li cases, where the majority of the costs goes to buying titanium Apple emblems to paste on the sides. Laptops consists of the rebranding of only the most silver and black Sony Viaos but talk has been going around about rebranding Asus EeePCs for a new Apple netbook but you didn't hear that from me, for fear of my life.
The iDevice team's job is to develop for the ipod, iphone, itouch, and many other portable electronics apple may release in the future. Their jobs are very interconnected with the open source team as well as the core dev team. Using firmware from random samsung devices and giving it an OSX skin the ipod stands as a shining example that infringement only applies to greasy file sharers and that the music player remains the best in market
For content creation:
- an ePub authoring program (given Pages.app v1's execrable html export I'd like to see someone other than Apple create this)
- AppleScript Studio --- let's take HyperCard to the next level and let's use computers as more than glorified memory typewriters
- both of the above could be merged into a tool to create iTunes LP format files for eBooks w/ interactivity
- ArtRage / Autodesk Sketchbook / Corel Painter (and a stylus)
- FutureWave SmartSketch (the program now known as Flash was originally a vector drawing program written for Go Corporation's PenPoint) or some other vector drawing program suited for use w/ just a stylus
- Infty Reader or some other sort of handwriting recognition software which encompasses not just multiple languages but also mathematical equations (naturally this too needs a stylus)
- a free-form database / spreadsheet which can be queried in a graphical fashion and have formulas calculated from it, where they formulas are natural expressions --- something like Lotus Improv plus sBook5
But above all, the option of a stylus --- we're no longer Pythagoras reduced to drawing figures in the sand w/ our fingers --- people are the tool using animal, let's provide the most natural possible tool for drawing, writing and calculating.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I use my iPad at home, you probably won't see me walking around with it.
I'd be ashamed too.
You could paint it orange and pretend it's a brick.
Or glue some hair to it, a rope, and pretend you're walking a chihuahua.
RobotBox - Robot projects from around the world
Why can't it be both. Why can't the 90hr work week be common knowledge while the details of what they're actually working on be a tightly help secret?
Anything created by Microsoft also sounds like it's from a line of hygiene products - hasn't stopped them so far..
which is totally what she said
You can knock it all you want, but there's a niche for the iPad. It's ideal for people like my wife. She likes knitting in her recliner while watching TV. Every once in a while, she will need to look up a certain stitch that she's not familiar with. So she has to put up knitting out of reach of the dogs (they like yarn too), leave the room and look it up on the computer. That means if I'm using the computer, I need to get up so she can poke around for a few minutes trying to find a good illustration or video demonstrating the stitch. In most instances not a big deal since I can usually stop what I'm working on, be it coding, editing video or paying bills & balancing the checkbook. Every once in a while it will be when I'm playing WoW and I'll be in a group, so it can be a pain in the neck because it inconveniences more than just me.
In our situation, the iPad would be perfect for her. If she needs to look up a stitch, she could just set her yarn & needles in her lap and look the stitch up on the iPad. If there's something on the news and she wants to look it up, check the weather, check her mail, check her Facebook, etc., she doesn't need to go through the whole rigamarole of stowing her knitting and then switching user accounts on the computer, etc. It's not that she can't do these things on the computer in the other room, but it would be so much more convenient for her to be able to check it from where she's sitting.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The iPad costs ~$265 to produce, just the manufacturing not including R&D costs. It sells for $499. Not even close to your 5-10x hyperbolic statement.
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If you're a small development house cranking out applications, you only need to make a Windows version and you've got a big chunk of the market
Until you run into hardware issues. Hardware issues for Windows and Linux applications fall into at least two categories:
Apple hardware tends to have fewer driver issues because the hardware is fairly consistent even across the Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook lines. You also know what minimum level of CPU, GPU, and RAM to expect from a "2007 Mac" and an end user can understand this.
Anything created by Microsoft also sounds like it's from a line of hygiene products - hasn't stopped them so far..
I don't know what kind of women you know who would use such a product named "Visual Studio." Eww.
Surreptitiously cover up the 'io' with your thumb and it gets more appealing to some.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
It's historically accurate if that's your question.
The author Bruce Tognazzini more commonly known as TOG, literally wrote the book on user interface design. He's arguably the greatest living expert on human-computer interaction and design.
He knows how Steve Jobs manages because he worked very closely with Jobs before, during, and after the development of the original Macintosh.
In the Art of War, Sun Tzu says: " When a general [is] unable to estimate the enemy’s strength ... the result must be rout."
This is the merely the beginning to understanding Job's secrecy. Naive competitors think that once the product is released they now know what the enemy's strength is, what Apple's strength is.
With Jobs and Apple, they're almost always wrong. Competitors rarely look beyond the product as released to see it for what it really is - an embryonic base on which to build. Apple will build on version 1.0 quickly, efficiently, cleanly and in a manner so completely integrated with existing features and Apple's other products, that consumers find it nearly irresistible. Predictably, competitors offerings will look like the fashion sense of the typical geek by comparison.
Uh, you guys do know who Bruce Tognazzini is, right? Oh I forgot, your average Slashdot poster living in his mother's basement had more insight into this than the guy responsible for the original Macintosh user interface guidelines.
Can you Apple fags please stop complaining about the complaints against Apple? The complaints are valid, your counter-"arguments" are not. What you're doing is just contributing to the backlash against the massive overhype of a frankly quite ridiculous product. Do you seriously think Apple will keep its "cool" when people such as yourself type that kind of ridiculous apologetics? You're a bunch of wankers, and that's the image of Apple right now.
it's pretty close to what Apple's selling right now with only slightly less battery life
A LOT less battery life! THREE HOURS in Tablet mode!
Here's what I recently said about the Touchbook (an idea I thought I'd love, but not in THIS incarnation!) to a friend of mine, recently:
"Touch Book: Oh yeah. I love the idea; but that thing that holds the display/tablet looks REAL sturdy (NOT!)... Failure prone. Also, isn't that the thing that runs some completely different OS when the screen is detached? 600MHz ARM (OMAP) microcontroller. That means it will be about as fast as an iPhone (maybe). iPad is not only a 1GHz MCU, but the iPad's A4 MCU uses an ARM Cortex A8 core (which is as badass as it gets in ARM town). BIG difference. Oh, and have you seen that touchscreen? It is EXTREMELY unresponsive. And not multitouch. THREE hour battery life in Tablet mode. How much? Next."
You DO note that not only is the TouchBook vaporware, but that it doesn't even have a price yet. How can that be compared in any reasonable manner to a device that:
1. Exists
2. Has a defined price point and specs?
But it is not a simple device: it requires a desktop or laptop for maintenance and synchronization
Actually not really. If you wanted, you could use the device without connecting to a computer (except for the initial connection to iTunes which is required).
After all, you can buy books and apps and music on the device. Although you'd probably want to connect it to a computer some times to back up data, even that is not absolutely necessary, especially for someone without a lot of generated data.
For instance, I can easily imagine giving one to a parent, and coming over with a laptop to do a backup once a month (or more).
aspects of the machine are infuriatingly complex.
Like what? Or are you thinking of something highly technical that no average user would want to do anyway.
It's also pretty pricey
$500 is not that pricey for a whole computer you don't have to maintain.
The thing people really don't think to factor in is screen quality - they say they don't want to read books on LCD's, but a lot of that is because they try reading on super crappy netbook screens where viewing angle is crucial and where images look washed out or slightly oddly colored. If it's really going to be your main device don't skimp on screen resolution or quality in a small form factor!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley