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Wozniak Calls For Open Apple
aesoteric writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has voiced a renewed desire to see the company open its architecture to the masses, allowing savvy users to expand and add to their products at will. However, Wozniak qualified his desire for a more open Apple by arguing that openness should not impinge on the quality of the products themselves. He also sees any change of heart on openness as a challenge when Apple continues to rake in huge cash with its current model."
Unfortunately, part of the effect of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field was to basically write Woz out of Apple history almost completely. If you listen to many
Apple employees and fans, you would think that Jobs created Apple single-handedly, perhaps with divine powers. There is very little respect (or even acknowledgement) at Apple for Woz or his contributions in the early days. In fact, very little respect is afforded there to the engineering of Apple products in general, versus their design and marketing. So, though it would be nice to think that Woz's voice might have some impact on Apple, he's probably even less likely to be listened to at Apple HQ than some random man-on-the-street.
Woz's story makes a lot of Apple die-hards very uncomfortable (particularly the bits about Jobs screwing him over). And the standard response seems to be just pretending that he doesn't exist, and ignoring him. It's sad and unfair. But that's the way it is.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
This will never happen. They've built their current empire by tightening control. They are not going to turn a 180..
....let's just go back to that Open Apple key instead. That's what Woz said, right?
I suppose the notion of Apple becoming more open to modifiers, tinkerers, hardware/software enthusiasts, and lowly programmers would be akin to Gillette giving away the plans and patents to its razor cartridges.
"However, Wozniak qualified his desire for a more open Apple by arguing that openness should not impinge on the quality of the products themselves"
The moment it is opened to others it will turn into the same mess that Windows has. Keeping the hardware closed makes development & support manageable. There's a reason nobody listens. This idea is dumb.
If Woz hadn't made himself the Judas of Apple fanboy mythology before, this should do the trick.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Did they already try this in the 90s by selling the Apple Mac form factor, standards to other manufacturers? It didn't really work out well for them.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Steve Wozniak is now open for employment.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Mod me redundant I know...
I wonder if Woz is hoping to get called to "save Apple" after they start screwing Apple up with their "MBA" thinking. Isn't that what screwed Apple up the last time? Got rid of Jobs, Apple went to hell, brought back Jobs and Apple came back double. We've all made the prediction that Apple will go to hell again without Jobs... it may take the "iPad 7" before people begin to realize what's wrong with Apple, but Woz isn't going to be invited to save Apple. Why not? Woz is way too different and he's not the "god" Jobs was. Also, Woz is a geek... his stuff appeals to people with "gadget love." Jobs was all about the new shiny things. Those new shinies are what made trillions for Apple.
That said, what would a new Apple "Under Woz" be like? I can imagine a lot of things. It would turn Apple desktops and laptops into Linux machines... or BSD machines. It would sell its OS for generic PCs. Something good or interesting might well come of it...who knows... I doubt we'll ever know. The MBAs knew they were wrong when they pushed Jobs out. They had to admit it when they called him back. But they have forgotten about all of that and they were never wrong and they always knew what they were doing and still do. Woz doesn't know what he's doing, I'm sure they will believe and they will never give him a chance to show what he can do.
If they ask me, they should hire some sort of coach for Woz, slim him down to fit into a turtle neck, and practice demonstrating new shiny things. He isn't Steve Jobs, but they need SOME kind of Steve to keep going. They're going to go downhill pretty fast otherwise.
He also sees any change of heart on openness as a challenge when Apple continues to rake in huge cash with its current model.
This....this is why it won't be happening for the foreseeable future.
Apple's lock down lost any claim to credibility when they started censoring political cartoons. This is about control and ultimately cash flow, not quality.
Palm trees and 8
Lets cut the apple open!
Apple is what it is: pretty design, a lot of marketing b.s., decent engineering, a hand-picked choice of other people's best technologies, and obscene profit margins on products sold to yuppies. Opening Apple up would destroy both the mystique and the profit margins.
If it weren't for Jobs then Woz would still be working at HP
And that's pretty much the problem. As much as I hate it and as much as I think it's terribly, terribly wrong, what made Apple big is marketing, not engineering. And that's not trying to bash Apple, it's what you can easily see when you follow Apple's history. It was a niche product while they relied on engineering. It was a great product, well engineered, with a lot of technical innovations. As soon as they moved towards design and gadgets, in other words, as soon as they went for flashy and gimmicky instead of technical innovation, people started flocking to them.
Woz, as much as I agree with you, I'd sad to say that this would be a bad move for Apple. It would certainly endear Apple again to engineers, but financially it would not be beneficial.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seriously... The mac's can all run several OSes: Windows, and several flavors of *nix, They run on standard hardware with standard chipsets.
iOS devices don't, but why would you care? You're buying the device as a vertical platform. If you wanted an iPhone "without so much Apple in it" then just buy a Samsung device.
Woz gets his kicks doing "cool" things, and he was really great at it. The problem is, "cool things" on their own won't let you make it or even survive in the computer business any more. It hasn't been that way since the early 90's.
Apple as a brand is all about promoting "quality" and "reliability" over power and flexibility.
Would you be willing to trade that for more openness?
Though I think there is a subtle point where some of this can be achieved. OS X is slowly losing some of its flexibility with its *nix foundation and this is disappointing from a tinkerer's perspective. I would like to see that come back a bit.
I'd settle for being able to install OS X on VMWare without hosting the VMWare hypervisor on a Mac Server 3.1 which they haven't made since Jan 2011. Yes, I understand that its possible, but not without violating EULAs of both VMWare and Apple.
I'd love to be able to run OS X in my VDI cluster.
Woz wants Apple to open up so that OSX can make a difference where Linux failed. OSX is the best OS out there today with no doubt. The Apple "Tax" is stopping many from seeing all the virtues of OSX and Woz wants to change that. It's that simple.
If you go to an open architecture, the only way you make money is from licensing, and manufactures in china will completely ignore this and screw you over.
There is a company that does that has been doing this very well for decades, Microsoft any one?
Woz is pretty much a failure as a business owner. Yes, he's an engineering titan, a legend even, but why he should be taken seriously in a domain where he has an awful track record is beyond me.
Kinda like the Greek government asking Mario Batalli for financial advice...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
If you're talking specifically about the iOS, that's a different matter. Apple has been able to foster a very healthy ecosystem of programs on tablet and phone with the walled-garden method; while I'd rather see something more open, the problem Android has had both on the carrier end (with carriers endlessly crippling / crapping the OS), on the developer end (with a serious revenue model problem), and on the malware end (malware on my phone is the worst possible place for it IMHO) shows that they've put some serious thought into this.
Yeah, they do have serious censorship problems, not only with disallowing mature content but with the arbitrariness of their decision making. This is an area I suspect they DIDN'T think through adequately before diving in. I do get annoyed that I can't tether my phone, but you've got to take into account the carriers, who are the worst sort of monopolists; they're still skinning us for text messaging, after all. But Apple's business tactics, for all that I disapprove of them, have created a thriving market where there was virtually nothing before, and cracked open the "tricorder era" in a way no other maker, not Blackberry, not Google, not Nokia, was about to do.
Without Woz, Jobs would have been nothing and Apple would have been a failure. Jobs isn't a god, of course he was an innovator, maybe a genius, but everyone makes you believe that Jobs came up with EVERYTHING, the User Interface, Design, EVERYTHING. This isn't the case, even Jobs admitted it, he said "It's the talented people at Apple that make the difference" or something like that.
Without Woz, Jobs would have found another engineer to do his bidding, sooner or later. Woz was just the first; he was the right guy at the right time. That time passed, both Steves moved on.
Jobs did his most impressive business-building decades after Woz had left Apple. He did his second-best business-building at Pixar, where Woz never even worked.
Wozniak hasn't done anything useful in 30 years. I'm getting tired of hearing him run his mouth. Who cares.
Jobs treated Apple customers like cattle, to be guided through narrow constricting chutes and confined in little cages, all while milking them of every last ounce.
I think it's hysterical that you think no one who uses Apple products is bright enough to make an informed decision about them. Do you really think there are no Apple users who aren't acutely aware of the alternative products available to them? Seriously? You think no one has heard of Windows or Linux or Kindle or Android? No one is trapped by Apple.
People use Apple products because they want to, not because they have to. Almost no one actually requires a Mac and the majority of computers sold are made by other vendors. You can do virtually all the same tasks perfectly well on a Windows and/or Linux machine. There are respectable quality competing products for the iPod, iPhone and iPad, widely available to anyone who wants them, often at lower price points and sometimes with features missing from Apple products or with compelling design features of their own. And yet millions still buy Apple products and have for many years now. This does not happen by accident or by marketing and Apple certainly does not (even today) have the market power to force people into buying their products.
(And before anyone starts, Apple customers are not mostly status seeking hipsters either. Nobody sells that many units over that many years on image alone. If the products sucked they wouldn't sell for long no matter how good a salesman Steve Jobs was.)
The slashdot crowd doesn't understand that and thus they don't understand why Apple is so successful. The "marketing" crap is your best attempt to rationalize Apple's success without having to expand your tiny little world.
Meanwhile, Apple is on their way to being the first $1 trillion company because nearly everyone else in the world understands something that you don't: "The ONLY point of technology is to make life easier for humans"--by that definition, Apple cranks out the best technology using the best engineering. Deal with it.
The company was rebuilt after Jobs returned. The new team and focus pretty much made the company what it is today.
A company like apple is bigger than one person. You don't create a company by yourself. You recruit and motivate the right people. Jobs was able to do that.
+1 I wish I had mod points for you.
I'm not sure how someone is a titan when his last (and only real design) was some time in the 70s.
A third reason is that he had a plane crash in 1981 which caused him to take a leave of absence. From what I read, it left some lasting, bad damage including memory loss. Between all that and being set for life, economically, he didn't have to go back.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
... "openness" was by no means his mantra. One of his first actions when he returned to Apple in the late '90s was to shut down the clone vendors. At the time I remember thinking this was a terrible, disastrous decision. Being essentially a PC guy who had an arms-length appreciation for the Mac, I naively thought Jobs was going to finally take Apple into the grave. I didn't see that Amelio was simply ill-equipped to run any company, let alone Apple and Sculley coasted on the early successes of the "Desktop Publishing" phenomenon that the early Macs became.
Of course, Jobs was completely right. Lock down the hardware and the software and make a better, more cohesive, more "designed" product. Avoid the terrible fragmentation that afflicts the PC industry. You end up with more elegant, more beautiful, and ultimately more functional hardware. These successes enabled the iPod which enabled the iPhone which in turn enabled the iPad and Apple's astonishing and unprecedented success in the business world - perhaps the world's first trillion-dollar company.
Anyway, if one is to believe Walter Isaacson's bio of Jobs, Woz was largely a bit player after he built the Apple I and II, essentially a "C" player / engineer reconciled very much to Jobs' shadow. He might be considered a close analog to Paul Allen, the critical technical talent behind the early success of Microsoft, but who essentially signed off early on (though Paul Allen did mainly because of health issues). Woz is essentially a geek who made good - very, very good - because of his good fortune to have hooked up with Jobs. Jobs didn't exactly "run" Apple early on - there were multiple Presidents/CEOs and he was ousted by them and the Apple board, ultimately - but he was crucial to its early success. Had the Mac never existed - and Jobs has to be credited with cajoling, inspiring, berating, insulting, and degrading Apple employees (at various times) to the nth degree to build the Mac the way he wanted it - Apple would have died much sooner and we would have arguably never had the innovation that came later.
In short, it just seems like Woz is spouting off randomness that will neither help nor particularly hurt Apple.
It had expansion slots! Oh, how I loved that idea. Something that PC copied and improved on and that we are heading towards again with Arduino shields etc.
My gut feeling [and I'm a greenie too] is that we need to modularise all our electronics so that we are not constantly throwing and recycling large hunks of kit. I'm aware that the structure and economics of the industry would have to change. But, after all, I'm from the post-war where things got mended and there were whole industrial 'ecologies' that did that.
About the only product that really has that now is the bicycle, you can replace nearly every bit of it. After you have done so, is it the same bicycle though? One needs to ask Heraclitus: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/heraclitus107157.html sorry, I'm beginning to ramble now...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
The logistics (fuel) guys say "Without us, your tanks wouldn't run."
The tankers say "Without us, you would have no reason for existing."
Woz supporters say "Without Woz, Apple would have nothing worth selling."
Jobs supporters say "Without Jobs, you wouldn't have been able to sell it."
Everybody needs to remember it takes a team where the members complement each other. Woz and Jobs would have sucked individually, but together they made Apple great. Jobs and Raskin made Apple great in the Mac. In modern days it was Jobs, Ive and Cook. And through most of the early history there was Tog, setting the standard for usability. If you want to talk about an Apple hero most people don't know about, look at the Tog.
Telling me what I think is rude, stupid, or both.
Nobody was telling you what you think, that would've been redundant.
I design products.
I do, too. But, see, the difference between us is that I don't come off as an asshole describing the way I do things. And, you do.
Put your money where your mouth is and design something better than an Apple product that has less censorship. Then we can continue this conversation. Until then Good day, sir.
FFS, knock it off. They're not entirely wrong, and you're not entirely right.
Signed,
A designer like you, but with a website that actually works.
2012 - 5 blades on 1 razor
2013 - 6 blades on 1 razor
2014 - 7 blades on 1 razor
2015 - 8 blades on 1 razor
etc.
People of Campbell and Los Gatos love Woz and the work he has done for the community.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Jobs was very good at relying on other people's opinions and making them his own. He did this with Woz in the early days of Apple. And he had many people other than Woz in the latter days.
I think it was more about being a sycophant that Jobs felt he could trust. When in private he could get an honest answer from them, and in public they would never embarrass him. (unlike Jef Raskin, who was always honest and managed to make an enemy of Jobs very quickly)
Unix is an operating system, made by engineers for engineers. It came about before Apple, and rose to great heights without Apple, and now Apple has adopted it as their platform. I firmly believe it will be around long after Apple.
You need a marketing genius to make a wildly successful business. You need a remarkable group of engineers to create enduring technology. I know which one I value more, do you?
(Unix has its faults, it's not perfect. But I think we can agree that it has proven to be a pretty useful OS over the decades)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Let Apple start with issuing again a Darwin LiveCD for regular OSes even with an EFI emulator.
So now that the wicked witch, Jobs, is dead, everyone is running amok. Unbelievable that after Jobs singularly (i.e., his direction) built the company into a powerhouse, EVERYONE now suddenly thinks that they "know better" and bad ideas such as this (licensing, open sourcing, etc.) - which Jobs specifically and integrally eliminated nearly two decades ago - get dragged out of the closet and trotted around like the greatest thing. Open source might work for Android, but that's because Google makes money on the back end. This is a bad idea. Shame on Woz.
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Here are some things Apple could/should do to become (again) good citizens of the engineering community. They'd see a huge surge in developers and technical users if they do this. As it is, most techies cannot use or recommend Apple in good conscience.
1. Political. Join OIN, and pledge never to sue first for patent infringement. Also, stop trying to buy bad laws. Pledge not to sue any open source project for patent infringement (eg font hinting). Make its media codec patents available to HTML5 without royalty.
2. It's *my* hardware if I buy it. Guarantee the ability to Jailbreak all devices. This is a win for users, a win for tinkerers, a win for some customers who need to run their own arbitrary code, and a win for security (exploits get fixed, rather than hoarded for jailbreaking purposes). I'd be perfectly happy to accept a compromise where a jailbroken device loses some DRM features. Root shouldn't be available by default (most users rightly want it simple, and to trust Apple to look after them), but should be available on request to anyone who is competent enough to run a CLI program.
3. Support all open standards where possible. For example, the iPod still can't play Ogg files. There's NO good reason why not: the cost is zero, and the hardware is capable. Likewise, the newest iPods won't work on Linux: Apple could very easily give a couple of free devices and some documentation to the libgpod project each time they release a new model. (this would be far cheaper than supporting native iTunes). Likewise, support for NFS as a media repository.
4. End the misfeatures for the purposes of lock-in, I've so often experienced this: it's like buying a shiny new car, and finding someone has deliberately welded an upturned thumbtack to the driver's seat. Every product has a sting in the tail - not because it can't do something, but because it won't. I can't be the only one who finds this frustrating.
5. I'd love to see a bit of extra focus on hobbyist and educational development. Perhaps Apple could stock the Raspberry Pi / Arduino, and Apple stores might sell items for geeks (eg bare iPod connectors for DIY docks, USB-to-Relay adaptors, and the tools usually made by iFixit).
Problem is that Apple floundered under Sculley and his successors before Jobs returned to the company. And they did try opening up the Power Mac architecture along w/ IBM, and you had companies like Power Computing, Motorola and Umax take a stab at making macs. Only problem is that by this was that by this time, the RISC challenges to Wintel that were supposed to happen had all sputtered - NT on RISC was going nowhere, IBM failed to come up w/ Workplace OS or OS/2 for PPC, Pink - the OS from that Apple subsidiary Taligent - never materialized, Be Box was shortlived and within Apple itself, Copeland and Gershwin went nowhere. In short, all the non-Unix attempts to produce OSs for non-Wintel boxes went nowhere.
By getting NEXTSTEP on the Macs, Jobs got over that problem, and realizing that the Mac Clones were only canibalizing Apple's business, but not winning marketshare from the Wintel segment, he decided to pull the plug on that licensing. A microcosm of this problem was seen earlier - when Apple switched from the 68k to the Power Macs, it didn't help the PPC gain any marketshare over the x86 - all it did was replace one Motorola CPU w/ another, which was an ugly result for Motorola.
Given all that, if Apple did listen to Woz, it would risk going back to the state it was in the 90s, when it was haemorraging cash. No reason to jettison what works right now. What they might do is introduce something really low end to target that section of the computer market that would prefer alternatives to Microsoft.
Still sad and irrelevant.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Apple needs to support old OS, software, programs and thus user data. Shame on them for abandoning Rosetta and Classic. At the very least if they won't support them then they should turn them over to the public domain with complete documentation so other people can support them, non-profit OR for-profit.
The Apple][ had an open architecture with 8 open slots. These got filled with memory, z80 processor cards, HD interfaces, and lots more. It spawned an industry. Now Apple is busy selling sizzle rather than protein, gloss rather than substance. But they do sell. There are more rich idiots than geeks.
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
Apple would easily sell the Woz the rights to his Apple II. He could then open the OS and open lots of prototyping bussing, cabling, and networking hacks.
You're a fuckin' dumbass.
The Mac has been completely PC hardware since the final step of using an x86 CPU in 2006. The same clone makers are pumping out the same equipment, architecturally wise, for Windoze and OSX.
Are we talking more about clearly unburdening and freeing up APIs/ABIs then?
Woz wanted more slots on the apple 2 as well - originally management wanted 4 slots max, he pushed for 8 and refused to do any less. He's a geek. He's not a businessman.
Apple don't want to get into the commodity market - there's no point. They can sell media to PC users already anyway. There's plenty of money in apple hardware and plenty of people willing to pay a bit more to get something that runs OS X and is nice.
There IS however a gap in their lineup between the Mac Pro and the iMac, but realistically the market is only a very vocal minority and I doubt there's much money in it. Most users are fine with an iMac, and if they need more apple would likely rather push them to a Xeon. Those who will refuse to select either of those 2 machines are probably such a small number they're not worth chasing. From a business perspective...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
assumptions really did make an ass out of both him and you.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Sexy design that comes with no compromise in usage freedom.
I'm beginning to get really tired of all that Apple fanboyism.
Really, Jobs and Wozniak, and almost all of the big fishes in the industry may have made millions, but their importance for the industry is near zero. Would we have a PC if it wasn't for Gates? Sure, we would. What has contributed Wozniak, the Apple I and II? There were plenty like them. Would we have smartphones, MP3 players, or slim laptops it it wasn't for Jobs? We would, no doubt.
We owe more to the chinese manufacturers that give us cheap supercomputers than to the Jobs and Gates of the world.
Will Open Apple make more money or Closed Apple make more money?
Casteism
The phrase "impinge on the quality" is interesting. Frankly I don't see Apple as having really high quality. They're no better or worse than most others, they have places they shine, and others where they suck.