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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."
Sounds to me like Jobs just got trolled hard. 10/10 for Ryan Tate.
Sorry Steve. The PC had me at "Hello boys"
Hehe, I will say that in the last image of the email exchange, Steve Jobs really zinged Tate.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
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.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
What Tate failed to realize that he was actually arguing with a bot, and Apple decided to start testing their new artificially intelligent overlord outside the lab. He then woke up in the morning with a stolen iPhone prototype in his pocket, and a dead hooker in his bed.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Doesn't really surprise me at all. Steve wants a controlled user experience and geeks want the freedom to do whatever the hell they want to do. The two clash. Steve is right though, we don't have to buy his devices, so don't. It's that easy. I do like Steve's quote at the end of the exchange, however. For as many people bitch about Apple here, there aren't enough that actually go out and do something about it. Even if you're not a developer, you can still vote with your wallet. If you want to drive FOSS to greater prominence, either help by using it or help by creating and fixing it. Complaining about Apple on the internet won't do much. Creating or helping to improve FOSS is only real way to stick it to Apple.
This guy just wrapped up all the common complaints that Adobe and the non-Apple customers want you to believe what's wrong with iPad, and sends off a profanity laced alcohol induced email exchange to see if he can out wit Steve Jobs.
I'd say that Steve stayed pretty much on message with what he's been always saying, even without his PR department to filter out his intent. And the blogger just looks like, well, a troll.
"As much as I enjoyed watching SJ take that clown to school, it probably isn't a good idea for him to do so since there's likely to be litigation against his employer in the near future."
Jobs was doing well until he brought up porn.
Porn has been published in every medium known to man since the beginning of time. We have literally found porn cave paintings. Porn is nothing new, and will continue to exist. And as long as it's existed, kids have always gotten their hands on it.
Steve acting as if it was some new fad that Apple is attempting to stem is disturbing. I'm not saying they need to start putting porn in the app store, but c'mon, Apple stopping sideloading so they can keep the iPhone free of porn? There are already ways of getting porn on the device (web), and kids can very easily jailbreak the thing to load on whatever they want. Apple is making a dumb stand on principle.
He told the Gawker editor that he'd understand if he had kids. One has to wonder if this is a result of a bad experience Steve has personally had with his family, and not so much a business decision.
Hari Seldon wrote all about it.
E
Didn't we despise Microsoft because of how successful they were?
Maybe you did, but my objection to them was for the multiple crimes they committed, and the dismal quality of their products.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Nobody would ever spend $100 on a fancy chef's knife when they could spend $40 and get a pocket knife that's not only got a blade to cut things, but also a screwdriver, a bottle opener, a tiny saw, and some tweezers.
Except that many people are plenty happy to spend their money on something that is designed to do particular tasks well, even if it can't do everything that a similar product can do.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Negative freedoms: the biggest load of BS to infect pop sociology in the last century. When someone claims to offer or desire "freedom from" anything, run for the hills, because they are either too naive to understand the costs or too traumatized to care. Neither viewpoint is healthy.
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.
On the other hand, if somebody wants a small gadget with a streamlined user experience that's also adapted to the hardware (no dialog boxes that don't fit on your mini screen, no 5x5mm touch areas, ), the iPad might be the right buying decision.
Incidentally, that's also what Steve Jobs (or whoever replied) said in those replies: Nobody is forcing you to get an iPad or develop for it. It's a free market. Just because you think you have no use case for it doesn't mean that nobody has one.
Jobs' empire is falling down around him. All hail FOSS, Linux, Android, and no more closed-source.
It is, after all, the 10th anniversary of the year of Linux on the desktop.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
sqrt(-1), Whoosh
Well played. It's the all new iWhoosh.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Why, did you do something with your iPad that was unauthorized by Apple?
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.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
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.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Description:
Transitory phrase for incidental topic is ineffective.
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By the way, what have you done that's so great?
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One more thing... what have you done that's so great?
Not only do I have the right to not buy iPads or iAnything, I also have the right to tell others why they should not buy them.
This whole "if you don't like them, don't buy them, but for God's sake, don't tell anyone about your opinion" is pure BS. After all, if Apple and their supporters take the right to tell me why the iPad is superior to other products (that they presumably haven't bought), I should be able to do the same. I don't buy Microsoft Office, and I also tell people why using native Office formats is bad. I won't buy an iPad, and I'll tell people why.