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

[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.

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.

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: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.

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

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.

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: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...

[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.

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.