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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."
You mean like USB ports, the ability to create and run your own software, the ability to chose your own OS, the freedom to download software from anywhere you chose, Flash support, the ability to export and import files at will, etc.?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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
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.
Yes, Grossman does get it right. That is my disappointment too. The iPad is all about consuming content, being a consumer. It is unlike a PC which can be used to create content. The iPad is a passive device.
Which was exactly my point, and which is immoral on the part of Apple.
Immoral, really? It makes it no longer a PC, that's all. Your alarm clock has a microcontroller on it as well, is it immoral for them to tell you how you can use it? Is it immoral that my microwave oven's warranty is voided if I replace the firmware?
Its uses are intentionally limited for the sake of people who aren't geeks. If unrestricted access is a necessity for you, then just don't buy the damn thing! Or, you jailbreak it and accept the consequences of the voided warranty.
There is nothing 'immoral' about building a device without general-purpose software access. Just because you think it is, or want it to be a PC, that doesn't make it wrong for Apple not to make it one.
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The same could be said of televisions. Does Grossman own a TV?
Or radios. Does Grossman own a radio?
Why are you disappointed with the iPad due to its difficulty with creating content? What were you expecting, exactly? If it doesn't suit your needs, don't buy one. They aren't replacing computers, you know....
For anyone who doesn't know what is meant by a boat anchor then watch Hunter Cressell's highly amusing (and still the best) Mac parody:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg7Xh0m_Oco
A lot of it is outdated, but stuff like the filesystem stuff is still true. That always makes me laugh as I had to do it many years ago: "You run to the store to buy the Mac version of Norton Utilities, you run back only for Norton to go 'You idiot! You own a Macintosh! The file is fucking gone!'"
People pointing out the problems with hyped products is extremely useful.
The problem is the people pointing out problems seem to refuse to accept that other people are capable of comprehending those problems. A minority of people are complaining about limitations those of us who are interested in the product either doesn't see as a limitation, or limitations that are outweighed by other benefits of the product.
I don't need another device for doing "content creation". I already have one of those I use when I'm at work. When I'm at home or traveling, I want something light I can use to keep in touch with people and entertain myself; I'd rather carry an iPad than a 7 lb laptop. Even at the office, my laptop is tethered to my desk all day, and it's something of a pain to undock it, reset all the open network sessions, and fire up the VPN just to take it into a meeting. With an iPad, I still have a way to check email, read PDFs, and interact with our internal engineering wiki without disturbing my laptop.
My mother doesn't do content creation. She emails her kids, plays light games, and bugs us on Facebook. I'd much rather give her an iPad and force her into Apple's walled garden where she's guaranteed some minimal level of protection from malware than spend another weekend cleaning shit off her Windows laptop because some friend of hers sent her some crappy game with a bunch of spyware inside.
This