Slashdot Mirror
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."
"In fact, very little respect is afforded there to the engineering of Apple products in general, versus their design and marketing."
That's because frankly none is deserved since the second coming of Apple. From discolouring Macbooks as the result of heat, to Magsafe fire hazard power adapters, to stupidly easily scratched iPod nanos, to cracking iPhone screens due to the construction being too tight such that when the batteries expand as they sometimes did the screen cracked, through to a phone antenna that had a fundamental design flaw. Even on the software there are many pretty awful examples - iTunes being the most obvious, Safari on Windows being perhaps the worst peice of software I've ever had the misfortune to use when it first came out.
For all the things Apple does right, quality hardware engineering just isn't it. There's simply been no end of defects in Apple products for no reason other than focussing just that bit too much on form over function. Their ideas are good, their products look excellent, and their interfaces are a wonder to use, but quality of engineering - both hardware and software - is pretty shocking for a company with so many resources. It's not that they're alone in this, look at Microsoft's RROD problem with the XBox for example, but I'd argue it's definitely Apple's weakest area with most room for improvement.
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.
No. Jobs was a snake oil salesman and you are just trying to repeat his sales pitches.
Chances are it was an outside agencies that wrote the sales pitch and that Jobs can't even really take credit for that either.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Cool story, but you forgot the part about the onion on your belt.