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Steve Jobs Says PC Folks' World Is Slipping Away
theodp writes "Provoked by an iPad ad promising a 'revolution,' Valleywag's Ryan Tate fired off a late-night missive to Steve Jobs. Jobs responded, and the two engaged in an after-midnight e-mail debate over lockdown, Cocoa vs. Flash, battery life, and whether 'freedom from porn' is a bug or a feature. 'The times they are a changin',' quipped Jobs, 'and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.' Tate was unswayed by the Apple CEO's reality distortion field, but did come away impressed by Jobs' willingness to spar one-on-one over his beliefs — at two in the morning on a weekend."
You can build a PC that will wipe the floor with any Mac for 900 bucks.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Sounds to me like you want a laptop, not an iPad. Due to this, I'd suggest getting a laptop, not an iPad, since the iPad doesn't seem to fit your use case.
And that's where my issue with Apple lies in regards to the iPad. IMO, Apple is blatantly misrepresenting the iPad as a computer, when in fact, it's not. They want to make it out to be a device that will do all of your computing needs when, even if you just browse the web, the lack of flash alone prevents it from doing that due to the prominence of flash on the internet (I'm not saying anything for or against flash, simply stating a fact that there are a LOT of sites that use flash, including youtube). I'm well aware that us nerds will research the iPad and make a decision to buy one - however, by their own admission for a long time, Apple's target audience is those who aren't too bright and sure as hell won't research a product before buying it. THAT is what irks me, is that they'll market the iPad to Technology-incompetent Tobi as being the device to do everything she could ever want and then she'll buy one, then find out after the fact that it DOESN'T do that (hell, without a COMPUTER to go with it, you can't even put movies / music on it that you don't download through iTunes because it has no usb / card reader).
I may not like the iPad, but I'm not going around telling people not to buy one or that they're stupid for buying one. But I sure wish Apple would be more honest in their marketing, though that goes for a lot of companies....
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Jobs didn't design those products, he merely oversaw those who did. Jonathan Ives (amongst others) deserves much of the design credit. And Ives got most of his design ideas from Dieter Rams, who's designs date back to the 50's. Apple's done very little truly unique over the years -- their primary accomplishments are in marketing.
I am no apple user (no iToys of any kind) but this is just silly.
Talking about Freedoms with a corporation about a product they roll out as if those are real Freedoms.
Carlin was right: It is all an illusion, an elaborate illusion of Freedom. You have no Freedoms. You have a Freedom to chose between Government parties, both of which will fuck you, the difference is that one will be Fucking you and enjoying it, the other will be Fucking you and probably bitching about how they really Love you.
Freedom of choice is not about gadgets, it's not about the latest iFad bullshit. It is really about your economic and political Freedoms and in a world with real Freedoms you'll find a stupid PAD that you personally like from some company who will inevitably produce one.
'Consumption Based Economy' - what a load of croak. Any retarded pissing himself idiot can consume. Production is the only way to generate wealth and the money is not wealth but only a medium of exchange. Wealth is in production. Consumption always comes as a response to production.
What an amazing world we live in. People used to die for Freedom - as in dying for Freedom not to be fucked over by someone's idea of how to run their lives and today we are talking about a stupid fake computer with limited capabilities as if a company locking out applications on it is the most serious violation of Freedoms. I guess we have figured out all of the other Non-Freedoms, like the Governments printing money and taking away the value of it from everyone, like the Corporations buying the Governments and destroying competition and becoming gigantic Monopolies that run everything. Where is your iFreedom, is it in the Apple store? Don't they have an app for that?
You can't handle the truth.
It's pretty obvious that you've never actually seen video of a Xerox Alto in action, or you wouldn't claim the Mac interface was a copy of the Alto. The two are very different.
It's also very obvious that you aren't aware that Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, not Xerox, invented the mouse and the windowed user interface as part of a system known as NLS . (NLS was also the first system with: bit-mapped displays, remote procedure calls, collaboration software, hypertext, remote graphical access, the chording keyboard, presentation software, and others)
The unveiling of NLS to computer scientists in 1968 is referred to as the Mother of All Demos.
See for yourself.
Enough metaphors. If you don't know how to use a computer, Apple is for you. If you know how, you don't need the crap that they're trying to sell you
As an embedded developer for the past 30 years, and an Apple user since 1976, I can assure you that your statement is utter rubbish.
I use Macs because I don't WANT to fuck around inside my computer. I got all that out of my system about 20 years ago with my Apple ][s, which lived perpetually with their lids off, so that I could tinker.
Now, I'd prefer my computers to be as APPLIANCE-LIKE as possible. Not because I "don't know how"; but rather, because I have better things to do. Apple (mostly) achieves that goal. I guess I can understand why others don't feel like I do, which is more than I can say for most of the people commenting here.
But don't ever mistake "don't want to" with "don't know how".
Englebart's NLS created the first implementation of Windows, and of using a Pointer to access Menus. The only addition made by Xerox PARC was the addition of Icons. NLS had bitmapped WYSIWYG graphics, but did not come up with the idea of using Icons to represent commands, using text based menus instead.
Here is a bit of Alto History for you:
The Alto was first conceptualized in 1972 in a memo written by Butler Lampson, inspired by the On-Line System (NLS) developed by Douglas Engelbart at SRI, and was designed primarily by Chuck Thacker.
Going back farther, NLS was inspired by work done by Ivan Sutherland who created a program called Sketchpad as his Ph.D thesis.
Sketchpad:
is considered to be the ancestor of modern computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs as well as a major breakthrough in the development of computer graphics in general. For example, the Graphic User Interface was derived from the Sketchpad as well as modern object oriented programming. Ivan Sutherland demonstrated with it that computer graphics could be used for both artistic and technical purposes in addition to showing a novel method of human-computer interaction.
Some video of Sketchpad in action is available online. (Jump to the four minute mark.)
Going back still farther, Everyone I've mentioned points back to an article by Vannevar Bush published in 1945 describing an imaginary personal computer called the Memex as a huge inspiration.
The Memex (a portmanteau of "memory" and "index", like Rolodex an earlier index portmanteau common at the time) is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. The memex is a device in which an individual compresses and stores all of their books, records, and communications which is then mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. A document can be given a simple numerical code that allows the user to access it after dialing the number combination. Documents are also able to be edited in real-time. This process makes annotation fast and simple. The memex is an enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory.
To sum things up...
Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad was inspired by Vannevar Bush's idea of the Memex.
Douglas Engelbart at SRI was inspired by Sutherland's Sketchpad when he created NLS.
Xerox was inspired by NLS when they created Alto.
Apple was inspired by Alto when they created Lisa and Macintosh.
None of these was a direct copy of the other. Learn some history, and STAY OFF MY LAWN!
(BTW - Neither Alto nor Macintosh were written in an object oriented programming language.)