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."

Comments

haha

[timmarhy]

steve gets a little market share and it goes to his head.

here in the real world, he hasn't hardly made a dent in personal computing. I'd admit he has cornered the wanky new toy gadget market, that's about it.

Re:haha

[peragrin]

your quite right, but the people have been eating at MSFT's burger king for two decades. the fact that they are now willing to try something different, is a sign all to it's own.

Re:haha

[thesandtiger]

The iPad isn't a computer. The iPhone isn't a computer. The iPod isn't a computer.

Oh, sure, in the broadest possible sense they're "computers" in that they're devices that compute, but they've gone into appliance territory. They're gadgets that let you do certain things in a certain way, and they're actually pretty good at that stuff.

A better analogy might be an Erector set (Mechano, maybe, for our European friends?) vs. a set of dolls or action figures.

With one - the Erector/Mechano set - you can make a whole bunch of stuff and do a bunch of different things. Sure, they might not be completely elegant, but if you want a truck, you can make a truck. If you want a house, you can make a house. If you want a robot, you can kind of make a robot. Some people - people who use Slashdot quite obviously - really like this freedom and don't mind the rough edges because they're a trivial price to pay for the flexibility.

With the other - the set of dolls - you can't really do nearly as much, but what you can do is going to be a more refined experience, and a more specific one. With this, instead of a generic truck, you're getting a Tonka brand Dump Truck. Or you're getting a Barbie Dream House instead of a generic house. Or you're getting Wall-E instead of random robot looking thing. You can't do nearly as much - I mean, if you get Wall-E you aren't going to turn it into a Tonka. Lots of people actually prefer this kind of experience, strange as that might sound. They want to play with Wall-E, not a random robot they made. They want a Tonka, not some truck-like thing. They don't *want* to have to put it together.

And some people like both for different purposes. Sometimes people just want to make whatever the feel like making, and sometimes they want to play with a specific toy.

Anyway, while people may have a preference for one or the other and think the one they didn't pick is shit, the fact is, quite a few people see some value - for whatever reason - in their choice.

When I grew up I had Barbies and also an Erector set. I wound up making machines that would pull apart the Barbies so that I could rebuild them as Cyborgs. I don't know what that means, but I thought if I'm gonna keep going with this toy analogy I might as well share.

Re:haha

[steelfood]

Yeah, I'd rather skip the Mickey D's and Burger King altogether, and cook my own damn meal. But given the number of obese people in the US, the money's going to fast food anyway.

I think our lifestyles, especially our eating habits, reflect our other preferences. Linux will never gain prominence on the desktop, because most people prefer to eat out rather than cook their own meal. It's pretty much as simple as that.

Re:haha

[MacGyver2210]

I can blame them.

Maybe I'm just a better driver than you, but I don't ride on the safe gleaming roads of Apple, nor do punks beat up my car when I go to the bad side of town. I haven't seen a brick wall in well over a year, even in a model commonly thought to attract brick walls. I taught myself how to use the car's security system and I know how to park it in a safe spot, even in the seedy areas. If that fails, I know enough about my car to completely overhaul it should anything truly disastrous happen to it in the red light district. Just to avoid problems, I do this once every 3-6 months anyway, whether or not something bad happened.

I was so interested in these cars and their various roads that I went to school and learned how they work. i learned all about how you can make little gadgets to go on your dashboard, and how you can get better gas mileage out of your car. Eventually, I learned all about how the engine works and how to rebuild it, or even build it from scratch. It was funny though, all the time I was practicing building these engines and components for my car, I couldn't build one that would work on Apple's shiny road.

See, I had to buy an apple car which would only work on their shiny roads to even be ABLE to put a new stereo in any of their cars. Even if the car wasn't mine. On top of that, it cost me subscription fees for the car building tools, and I had to build them using uncommon foreign tools which were nothing like standard cars and took much longer to do the same task. Even once I had built a new stereo for their cars, they could choose not to let me install it for any reason they wanted. Without even giving a reason. It was their road, and they had complete control.

On top of that, despite the fact that the CEO thought that EVERYONE wanted one of their cars, most really didn't, and very few people even drove them. There were TONS of people using their mopeds and segways, but they could only ride on the shiny sidewalk at a lower speed limit, and were still limited by the company's rules for their roads.

Now what if I wanted to help a friend with one of these change their tires? Forget it, I had to send it back to the dealership at my expense, and wasn't guaranteed anything of a repair unless I had previously paid them a large 'Just in case' fee. Top it all off with their car costing $1000 more than mine for no apparent reason other than their name on the side, and the choice was very clear.

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. Eventually Apple's stupid customers will run out of money for the overpriced shiny crap, and they will go under and once again(like not too far in the past) they will be left whining about monopolies and begging Microsoft for more money.You have fun jumping through your hoops to watch porn - I'll just click the link.

Re:haha

[drinkypoo]

But don't ever mistake "don't want to" with "don't know how".

When I had to recover the password on an OSX system, and had to figure out how to get to single user, then start several critical services without which I could not even log in a real user or change a password, I knew that all that stuff about macs being trouble-free was horseshit. All the times I've had to manually edit a plist because some part of OSX was failing to start up tell me that you're a bullshit apologist. OSX may break less often (although IME, it hangs as much as anything else) but when it does it's just as hard to fix as anything else. And practically, it is actually harder, because there are less resources to help you fix it.

The simple truth is that OSX doesn't prevent you from having to fuck around inside your computer's software, and no modern computer requires you to be continually tinkering with hardware, so that is a red herring.

Re:haha

[daviddennis]

Apple's App Store has sold billions of dollars worth of apps, and has millions of happy customers. By any reasonable criteria it has achieved greatness.

As for iPad, yes, I think it's the best thing out there for the purpose it serves. It's a portable device to browse the web, and it lets me use over 5,000 programs designed exclusively for it, almost all of which are interesting, fun to use and available at very fair prices. Not to mention almost 200,000 iPhone apps.

Have you tried one?

What device would you consider better for that purpose?

D

Try this one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Go out, buy nothing but an iPad and tell me how good your computing experience is 12 months from now.

No cheating. Not a single transaction on a single machine that isn't an iPad.

I dare you.

Re:Try this one...

[steelfood]

Money? You can't even use the damn thing without connecting it to an actual computing device first.

If you were somehow stranded on a remote island with a brand new iPad and a power source (a solar powered battery charger or whatnot), you'd basically have a small kickboard that doesn't float.

On the other hand, if you instead had a phone, a netbook, or even a wireless router, you could at least broadcast a signal out and hope that passing rescue craft would be able to detect it. With an iPad, you've got nothing.

Granted, getting you off a remote island isn't exactly the advertised use case, but it goes to show exactly how narrow the iPad's use actually is. In particular, it's a rather expensive supplement to a real machine, rather than a real machine in and of itself.

Re:Steve held his own...

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, he really zinged him with a charge that's been levied against every critic and reporter since the first critic peed on a cave painting.

26% of the planet connected

[hhawk]

The computer, consumer electronic market and the gaming console market are like quick sand; its hard to say who is really winning or losing.

26% of the Planet is online.. but the vast majority of them are connecting with Mobile Devices. The rest are connecting with some type of Intel/AMD based device and some with other processors like ARM but very few of them (I don't have the exact percent) are running an Apple OS.

Thus in that context Apple while is winning in consumer electronics (phone, music play, etc.) versus Microsoft there is real competition and MS had phones for a lot longer. MS is winning over Apple in the gaming console area but has lots of competition from real gaming companies..

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

What disappoints me...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is that the guy who decided to go up against Steve did such a tepid job of it.

If you really feel like trying to piss Jobs off for his control-freakery and insistence on building Computers Where The Trains Run on Time, you don't just whine about "freedom", you throw his past as an ostensibly anti-establishment maverick in his face.

"So, Steve, you finally got rid of those slots that Woz was always sneaking in to things, and have even managed to build a (walled) garden of pure ideology, where each user may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory runtimes and confusing languages..."

Re:Benefits

[arbiter1]

you can get new pc laptop that cheap, goin by prices on apple.com you can't get one their for anything short of a 1000$, might well go for that wepad that the one german company made, least they are not tieing ur ass down like mac does with all their crap. With all the tie downs they mark price for their stuff a good 50-70% higher then pc counter part with same hardware. you mac fan boys can call me a troll or flamer all you want but facts are Facts.

Re:I rarely read ValleyWag.

[maccodemonkey]

"Well, sure there's going to be porn on the iPhone too, but Apple's not going to be the company that delivers it."

There is a difference between Apple delivering porn, and Apple attempting to stop everyone else from delivering it.

I've worked for an organization that buys Apple products in several thousand batches (they're the biggest spenders on Apple products in education in their respective state. And the state in question is a west coast state that is very big on technology.) The major holdup with the iPad has been sideloading. It's very difficult for an organization to manage iPads en masse when they can't even manage the deployed software easily. The lack of sideloading was first blamed on mobile applications threatening cell networks (which everyone knows is a load of bull), and then more recently, porn.

The organization in question currently runs off Macbooks. The kids have loaded porn on the Macbooks. Before that we had desktop machines. The kids loaded porn on those. Hell, I remember before we had computers and the kids brought porno magazines to school. Yes, we were concerned about porn, but it was nothing new.

While Apple restricting the device makes it easier for us to enforce discipline, it also cuts us off at the knees and almost makes the iPad a non starter in enterprise. Yes, Apple does offer a private app store for your organization. But that doesn't really mean much when we need a way of loading software onto thousands of devices at once.

Apple is supposedly sending engineers to my old employer to look at these issues. I hope it results in an improvement to the manageability of iPhone OS.

All the cursing

[KrugalSausage]

I find it funny that Ryan Tate is unable to engage in rational dialog without cursing (cursing is the analog to yelling in real life), especially when he has a chance to actually engage with the most well known CEO on the planet. He squandered it and comes away looking like an ass.

Re:Steve held his own...

[ClosedSource]

It's also worthwhile to remember that while Jobs is certainly the credit-taker, there's no evidence that Apple's best achievements were Steve's personal accomplishments.

Future thinking is not decided on the exact 1st...

[bussdriver]

IF the iPad is the future; the future will NOT be iPads all over, it will an evolution of the concepts that made it so big that will change everything and people will point back to the source of that to the iPad; or for the technology, back to the Newton, PC Tablet, and iPhone - but mostly back to the iPad.

Expect heavy bitching to create competitors and nudge apple into other directions. The ubuntu like app stores will continue to be popular - and the list will continue to be filtered to a select few to cut down on the bloat of crap software. Apple is protecting their experience by acting as a gateway now and it has proven effective; but at some point it could change.

The 1st mac changed the world forever. It wasn't the 1st on all of it, they payed xerox for secrets that the public didn't know about. The computers today are quite different but they are BASED upon that early mac.

The iPad could very well be the future of laptop computing for MOST of the world of the future and while the tablet PC was 1st (or arguably the Newton) and the others didn't win over the public; like the iPod came in late in the game; as well as the iPhone.

I will not buy an iPad. Its not good enough or open enough for me yet.

Re:Freedom from porn.

[Lord Kano]

Is there even human history before porn?

No.
Look here.

For at least 40,000 years humans have been creating images of people having sex.

LK

Re:Freedom from porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am free from programs that steal my private data on my PC if I choose to be.

But you are part of a minority group that are even aware of such behaviour, and presumably an even smaller group competent enough to verify a given app's behaviour. Most people don't fall into either of these categories.

How does your average person determine the behaviour or privacy implications of any given piece of software? Ask strangers on the internet? I've done some research on this, and I can comfortably state: the internet is full of fucking morons giving bad advice. The real world has the same problem, and the bad-advice-givers all self-identify as experts, so if you're meant to find someone trustworthy to ask first, you're basically in the same boat you were in looking for trustworthy software.

Your kind of freedom is fine for those who have the time and capacity to learn enough to keep from pointing the internet-bazooka at their own feet. Apple is trying to look out for the rest where they can.

Re:Except Apple is not interested in "winning"

[Shag]

In countries were [sic] people earn a few $1,000 a year or even a few hundred, I don't see how Apple could make a product cheap enough to make $$.

I spent 2 weeks in Uganda at the beginning of this year. (There was a nice annular solar eclipse.) Per-capita GDP is about $1,300. Of course, that's an average - some folks make less, some make more - and includes kids and whatever.

Anyway, anyone who makes enough above that average has an iPod. At least a shuffle or a nano. People who can afford one - say, managers - have an iPhone 3G S. There are ads for the iPhone all over Kampala. There's an Apple authorized reseller downtown.

There's also a lot of counterfeit product from China in the market, which is a lot cheaper and typically breaks after a few months. It's interesting to go to a market that doesn't have the level of IP law and trade regulation in place that the US does.

One and the same

[pizzach]

Call me a heretic, but I like both Steve Jobs and Stallman. I would rather have both or none rather than just one. They each are both ballzy and push for what they want to see in their respective ecosystems. In the case of Stallman's ecosystem (GNewSense), flash doesn't exist either and all closed source blobs must die. You can't tell me this doesn't cause restrictions.

Steve Jobs is a crazy man who has time and time pushed for things that people thought were ridiculous and would never fly. The thing I like the most about Jobs is he keeps getting Apple to do things against the corporate grain that makes the companies around them shat their pants. I wouldn't think investors in a publicly traded company would allow him to do things like not license patents on multitouch etc.

My 5 cents anyway.

An Ode to the Beauty and the Horror!

[bknack]

I got a PC.
I found I could configure it endlessly. Tailor it perfectly. Oh, the Beauty!
My friends wanted to use their PCs. They got lost is a maze of configuration hell. Oh the Horror!

I got a MacBook.
*Gasp* I could barely configure it at all! The Horror!!
My friends didn't notice as they got down to Beautiful work.

I agree with everything Steve Jobs is trying to do with his devices. He lets us use them his way. Oh, and if we play ball they work! *Bonus*

I hate the constrains Steve Jobs puts on me!

Here's the secret... wait for it...
Steve knows (and I know he knows) that folks like me will ultimately thank him because:
1. Our friends don't have to constantly ask for our help to de-virus, un-malware, re-install the thing after they shoot themselves in the foot with it *Beauty!*
2. We just jailbreak the thing (the Horror and the Beauty) and now Steve (I bought the device) and I (I stepped out of the walled garden but won't blame Apple for any problems I have) are both happy.

Cheers,
Bruce.

Re:Ah, yes; "freedom from."

[dangitman]

No. Freedom from murder isn't freedom, nor is freedom from discrimination, or freedom from government censorship.

Why not? How about freedom from slavery? I think there are quite a few million people who would agree that their freedom from slavery is an actual freedom.

(not to mention incorrect... you can still be murdered or discriminated or censored).

This is a nonsensical argument. You have the right to liberty, freedom of speech, etc. That doesn't mean those rights can't be infringed. Are you saying that the Bill of Rights and the Constitution are meaningless because it is physically possible to violate those laws? You're completely missing the point.

Re:Sounds to me...

[bzipitidoo]

What I find so disappointing about Jobs is not anything about him really. It's that the public doesn't value freedom enough to tell him where to stick his proprietary lockdown schemes. It's really amazing how an excellent UI is so valuable to quite a lot of people that they'll pay much higher prices, and blow off the overreaching fine print that infringes on our rights. Maybe they're right about EULAs not being worth even a quick look, and ignoring EULAs is the best way to handle them.

At least no DRM encumbered music format has gained traction. Shows that people do have limits. I'm sure Apple would push a DRMed format if they could get their customers to accept it.

Re:Ah, yes; "freedom from."

[Kohath]

All those folks who wanted freedom from slavery just didn't understand the big picture, huh?

Freedom from something harmful, like spam and viruses (to get back on topic a little) is great when you're being harmed.

In fact, the negative freedoms are really the only ones we're entitled to. Free expression is just freedom from someone forcing you to shut up, for example.

The freedom to express yourself is all too often confused with "gimme a government grant" so I can get high and be a sculptor instead of getting a job and being a grownup.

Re:Ah, yes; "freedom from."

[dangitman]

You should really *think* about the words you type rather than parrot what you hear on TV.

That's an ironic statement, given how little thought you have put into your words.

There is a difference between freedom of speech *which grants you the ability to say what you want-it additionally grants speech to the list of freedoms you already enjoy* vs freedom from being murdered *which is just a retards way of defining "security of person"* Freedom is different from security...

I never said anything about security. Do you have reading comprehension problems?

Freedom from government censorship is a silly way of saying "freedom of speech."

They are two different things, but they are both meaningful. "Freedom" has many different shades of meaning. For example: when I am on vacation, I am free from the duties of my job. So, please explain again how "freedom from" is not a valid term.

If you hear anyone ever speak the words "freedom from government censorship" ask them "do you mean free speech, because if you do, just say free speech."

But "free speech" can have meanings other than "freedom from government censorship," so they aren't equivalent.

the point *I* am making is that your verbiage and general use of language is based on parroting nonsensical statements you hear on TV.

That would be a stupid thing to say, because it is not.

The GGGP is explaining that the term "freedom from" is BS. There is no such thing as a negative freedom (a "freedom from"), you cannot take away something and expect a higher degree of freedom.

That's completely nonsensical. Saying "freedom from" is not a "negative freedom" - that's just a made-up term that makes no sense. It's Orwellian doublespeak. We can't be free if we aren't free from certain things, like oppression.

How is saying that one should be "free from tyranny" at odds with saying one should be "have freedom of liberty"? They are just different expressions of a similar sentiment.

Re:Sounds to me...

[fyngyrz]

It's really amazing how an excellent UI is so valuable to quite a lot of people that they'll pay much higher prices, and blow off the overreaching fine print that infringes on our rights.

• Excellent UI
• Excellent hardware
• Excellent (and easily used) software
• It really does "just work" right out of the box
• iPod ditto
• iPad ditto

I find Jobs to be the exact wrong person to exert his idea of morals and ethics upon the morals and ethics of his customers. His cry of "you'd understand if you had kids" is just the kind of moronic posturing I'd expect... the Apple store is chock full of blood and gore, but sex, one of the most wonderful things we get to involve ourselves in, is "bad." This is how I *know* that Jobs is possessed of absolutely bankrupt morals and ethics, and why I don't think he belongs between myself, or my children, and content of any type.

However, he is the exact right person to nail down hardware and software guidelines. How do I know? I run Linux, Windows and OS X. OS X is - by *huge margins* - the best of the three to use day in, day out.

So hey, Steve: If you were half the man you think you are, you'd pull the violence from the apple store and put sex in. But you're not. You're a posturing idiot who is playing the social game for sales, tapping the social retards who love violence and wave their little religious hands over there eyes at the sight of sex. Congratulations, chump. Stick to areas you have skill in: hardware and software design.

Not content.

Re:Sounds to me...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"Recognizing "the good stuff" when you see it is rare. Transforming ideas into marketable products rarer still."

Actually, the stuff in Xerox Labs was so good that *everybody* recognized it as such, including, say, Niklaus Wirth, who after having visited PARC did more or less the same - started building similar computers and OSes, perhaps only slightly more resource-efficient, in line with his preference for small but clever systems :-). The only ones who didn't were, sadly, Xerox executives - but that was all it took.

Solutions

[SuperKendall]

The biggest problem has always been user attitude and actions, something which is often WORSE on Mac than it is elsewhere due to the prevalent belief that "Macs can't get virus/malware!".

For around five years now the Mac has been free of viruses and malware. So who has been more wrong, the person who rightfully believes the platform is free of malware or the person who thinks if something may someday have malware it is eqivilent to having it?

When users stop running as admin and stop clicking pretty screensaver ads then we'll have made some real progress

Congratlulations, you just "got" the iPad. When a platform that has already enjoyed years if actual freedom from viruses and malware makes it nearly impossible for non-technical users to run as admin, does at least an overview of apps for sale while sandboxing them from the system and each other - well that system is going to be more secure, and indeed as you said real progress has been made.

I think the other things Jobs described as freedoms are something else. But freedom from Viruses and Malware is in fact a freedom, which I know now from many years of enjoying it. That's the thing about frreedom, you know it when you have it, whatever form it takes.

Re:Sounds to me...

[Narpak]

I don't think he belongs between myself, or my children, and content of any type.

Precisely. Steve Jobs should refrain from trying to enforce his own moral codex upon the technology. I understand that it is "his product" to do with as he will, but I prefer to get my hardware and software without a lecture about what I should or shouldn't read, watch and/or play. A service mechanic that helped making adult material only available to adults is fine, but outright censorship because he "feels it is wrong" I do not agree with.

While the current "PC world" might slip away with time, as everything does inevitably, there is little doubt that computers in various ways and forms will be with us for the predictable future. They might not all be PCs as we understand them today, but neither do I think it will all be apple products.

Re:Benefits

[Antisyzygy]

I've been using a pc for 13 years. You know how much down time I've had? Maybe a few days a year. It pays off to have common sense not to click on nefarious links and to read a little bit to know what you are doing. Macs simply are not used by anyone smart enough to make a virus.

Re:Sounds to me...

[Risen888]

You could at least provide some examples here

Oh God, I thought you'd never ask. Not the OP, but let me play! Just a quick Top 4 here, because I could really go on forever but I'd like to read the rest of the thread.

1. The ungodly top bar on OSX. Self-morphing UI elements are a Bad Thing. How this abomination has survived so long is totally beyond me, but I think it has something to do with that shitty hack called...
2. The dock. The idea that "it shouldn't matter whether or not the application's running or how many instances of this application are running" is bullshit. Just because Microsoft parroted it doesn't make it good. (Christ, if anything, MS took the worst of it.) There's plenty of room for innovation in 2D interfaces. Take a look at Gnome Shell (I'm not huge on it, but I'm not huge on Gnome) or the Plasma Netbook interface (which I am an enormous fan of). Plenty of room for new ideas. Doesn't change the fact that the dock was a shitty one.
3. The wheel interface is still dumb. If I have to take the mp3 player out of my pocket to know what I'm doing, that's a big fat fail.
4. Okay, I was just gonna do three, but here's a bonus: the iTunes database. Apple fanboys can pretend all they want that "normal users don't care where on the hard drive their music files are." But they know they're lying. Every time I have ever brought this up to an iTunes user, they've agreed with me. "Yeah, I've always hated that too, but what are you gonna do?" as if it were some kind of law of nature.

My rare, reluctant agreement with Jobs

[KingTank]

For computing I prefer Linux, and to a lesser extent, even MS. But I think Jobs has a point about freedom. Freedom can mean different things. We're accustomed to thinking of freedom in the grand terms of human rights, but that only applies in a vast, over-arching governmental or societal context. I think we have to get used to the idea that in a smaller context, the concept of freedom can sometimes be something more limited, petty or banal. Yes, freedom from porn is a petty, but not completely worthless, kind of freedom. No doubt it provides some value to a lot of his customers. As computers become relentlessly more and more powerful and pervasive, innovators will come up with more and more ways to provide these little freedoms that some of us roll our eyes at, but provide value to others.

I love Steve Jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for Apple. I joined after Steve Jobs left the company and started Next, and I left before he came back to Apple. I left because I had completely lost faith in the senior management. Remember Michael Dell's comment that if he was Apple CEO he would shut down the company, sell the assets and distribute them to the shareholders? That was my view also.

When I left I had a bunch of Apple shares - some from stock grants, some from the employee purchase plan. The shares were worth a few dollars each, so I didn't bother to sell them - I didn't need the money that much. That was my good fortune.

Now look at the price. So far, the shares have paid for my daughter's education and paid off my mortgage. And I still have enough to fund a good few years of my eventual retirement.

Keep going, Steve. Ignore the detractors - what have they done? Have they taken a failing company and made it into a technology and marketing powerhouse? Have they taken a share valued at $5 and increased its value year after year? There have been 2 splits on the way, so each $5 share is now four shares, each one worth around $250.

Re:Sounds to me...

[BasilBrush]

Apple still forces you to resize windows from the lower-right corner.

And the cost of being able to resize from any edge in Ubuntu for example? The need to have a fugly border all the way around every window, which on the one hand consumes display real estate, whilst still being narrow enough that it proves hard for some users to be able to grab easily.

Forcing the user to do things Steve's way is not a benefit to the user.

Limited numbers of geeks like to customize stuff. For most functionality for the vast majority of users it's better for the designer to make a reasonable decision. Ref: The Paradox of Choice.

In terms of learning curve, their interfaces are slightly ahead. In terms of productivity, their interfaces are years behind.

Your abstract opinion. I'd argue that people are most productive on well designed UIs, and Apples UIs are way ahead of anything Linux has.

They took NeXTStep's dock and ruined its defaults for prettiness instead of muscle memory, for example.

That's probably a fair point (not that I ever actually experienced NeXT myself.) And the reason is Fitt's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law

And you have to move the mouse farther (and on a large display, actually refocus your eyes) to use the single menu bar.

And there you are wrong. A menu at the edge of the screen is easier (more productive) to use. Again because of Fitt's law. Plus it also is more economic on screen real estate.

And until OSX, Apple didn't even have minimize/maximize, instead using the same multifinder approach they've been using (annoyingly) for years.

i.e. It doesn't work like Windows. And Linux copied the Windows functionality. The paradigm in Mac OS is not to run applications full screen - instead of maximizing, the zoom button only increases the size of a window's height or width until the scroll bar is no longer needed (or the extent of the screen is hit.) Any extra growth of a window beyond that takes up screen real estate without revealing any more of the document. It's a waste.

You are used to Windows and/or Linux, and you assume that it's the right way to do things. When the real issue is that it's just the way that you are used to things being done. That doesn't mean it's the best way.

Re:From: "PC Folk"

[Bigjeff5]

It seems to be the only thing the EU was able to get out of the whole situation, so with their absurd handling of the fallout it's hard not to think the only thing Microsoft did was bundle the Browser. It's all they are apparently being punished for now.

In truth bundling the browser wasn't even the crime, it was strong arming OEM's into not bundling Netscape. All you need to do is punish them for that, and make sure the consequences for a repeat offense are significantly more dire, and the problem is solved. Instead they're doing strange browser selection bullshit. It's weird.

Jobs = God?

[Askmum]

Already after the first reply from Steve I was confirmed in my thinking that Jobs is an absolute and total twat. What, that he decides for me that I can not watch porn constitutes freedom for him? I am so fortunate that my PC world is not slipping away from me. I am so relieved that I actually have a choice what to install on my PC and what I can watch and what not. And then He talks about freedom? It is the freedom the likes of Kim Yong Il and Mao fight for. That's no freedom, that's oppression.

And really, explain to me (having no kids) what the thing is about porn and kids. When I was really young, porn didn't interest me, but I did play doctor with some of my (girl) friends when I was 8. And by the time I was 14 I was going out of my way to look at the nudiemagazines. So, that's bad? Why?