Basically, Sun never supported Java on the Mac, Apple did. Apple provided the developers, the tools, apple did all the work, and then paid Sun for the privilege. (it costs money to make sure your JVM was approved).
With oracle now suing every other Java implementation out there that wasn't approved Apple probably thought it just wasn't worth it. Expensive to do, costs money to do it, and unless your sending money up to oracle yearly, now a patent nightmare mess.
Look at it this way a side effect might be that Oracle stops suing non oracle approved JVM's, including Davik. The Bad press might be more than they realize.
I was thinking the same thing. Oracle is becoming too lawyer-trigger happy with Java, and even if I was "safe" under some agreement I still would back out before they found a loophole to try to sue me over too. Besides, there is heavy chance their licensing agreement has ties to OS versions, and the upcoming Lion OSX forced revisions with terms Apple did not agree with.
Thing is apple's app store is not meant to be a repository in that sense, but simply a store. The app store is just a virtual Walmart for mac software.
If the mac community wants a linux style repository, its best for the community to create it. I wont be shocked if this inspires a Cydia and/or Rock port for OSX.
The big difference is that the Linux distros all have a method for including other repositories as well - you don't have to "submit" an app to an official Ubuntu, Fedora, etc, repo.
You mean like Steam, the second (that I can recall) app repository available for mac specialicing in gaming? Or Direct2Drive, MacGameStore, GamersGate, Deliver2Mac. These are all game based ones, but being a desktop, you can offer any third party managed mac app repository you want. All have their own Q&A process and rules for acceptance. You are much more likely to get a game into the Apple App Store than into Steam or any of the above listed app stores.
Apple should allow users to configure 3rd party app repositories and allow them to use Launchpad and auto-update as well.
My memory may be faulty, but I saw the keynote and Jobs said you could add apps to the launchpad. He didn't say at all that it was only for App Store apps.
And as noted above, nothing stops you from installing a front end for any repository you want that may be available. They could even buy ads in App Store ad space (because you can be sure, there will be free apps that finance themselves through advertisement)
It will indeed be less attractive to get an app from other sources.
However, I watched the entire keynote and as far as I recall, Steve said "you can add your apps to the launchpad."
That being told, the Launchapd is just like the Homescreen in my iPhone, and once I got 3 screens worth of apps I found it to be faster to use Spotlight to find the app I want to run. Guess what? Spotlight is already the way I do the same things on my mac.
I don't think the Launchpad will be the ultimate way to launch apps in the future, at least it wont be for me. I already use the desktop for similar results anyways.
All that aside, yea, going back to the attractiveness, App Store distributed apps will indeed be preferred. It will be the first spot for many to look up apps before they reach out to the web. I don't think this will bury non-app store apps, though. At least not for popular apps. I see most free software ending up in the app store for easy access.
Perhaps big software like Photoshop and Office wont make it, mainly because they will refuse to agree with the "buy once, run on any machine you own" policy. At the same time, I look forward for people that start developing small Photoshop alternatives because now they have an easy way to spread their product, selling it for a very affordable amount, and being founded by night-micro transaction income, being able to grow into worthwhile rivals.
And they built it for good reason, too. Have you seen what they put under that place-marker? There's a prison whose sole purpose is to absolutely contain the most feared creature in the universe.
So iOS is definitely a bad choice for users who want to tweak.
However, despite allowing users to tweak, Android is not a bad choice for people who just want the device to work.
The "just works" category tends to be heavily aimed at downloaded apps. I don't know what is the difference, but my older brother has an HTC Incredible, and the younger an Evo. Both tend to often find software that run in one but not the other. That is what I mean by "just works", Apple's closed system does it's best to make sure apps run in their OS. Only gotcha is they don't tend to go through all approved apps after updates, and some of these updates may occasionally break an old app.
As far as tweaking, though, out of the box the Android allows much more tweaking, but it's not like the iOS can't be hacked into allowing a very similar level of openness (as long as you don't want to make your own branch of the OS itself)
There is a lot of tweaking you can do on an iOS if you jailbreak, I personally prefer not to since most of the "open" stuff in Cydia tends to be buggy like hell.
PCs are, for the most part, just hardware fragmented. The OS of the standard PC tends to be a fairly standardized version of Windows.
Android platform is seeing a much faster and much heavier fragmentation than the Windows Desktop has ever seen. If it keeps going this way much further, in 2 years people may as well forget about making Android Software and focus on making "HTC Incredible" software or "Evo" software, etc etc.
Integrated vs fragmented. He's just trying to redefine the terms in his favor.
Open > Closed
vs
Integrated > Fragmented
Well done Steve.
It all depends on who is buying, as he said: "When selling to users who want their devices to just work"
If you are a grandma that just got such a device, you will be on the "users who want their devices just to work" category. If you read slashdot, you are likely not in that category and instead in the "i want to tweak this thing to no end" category, in that case, obviously iOS devices are not for you.
I was very clear about this when I got my Wi-Fi iPad. It still can point me in the map, exactly points at my apartment in a cramped up community, something I find very scary given the thing has no GPS. Didn't know you could get that much information out of your Wi-Fi alone.
Then 1.5 doesn't count since it's share is less than that of Vista (sitting at 13%)
It's not about share. Anyone that is running Vista can upgrade to Windows 7, as it's actually lighter than Vista. There are still Android devices out there with no way to upgrade because their providers don't offer a supported upgrade path.
Even then, though, as the article noted, there seem to be over 100 different versions of the OS. Every carrier makes their own version of each release, on top of the versions people install on their own into Windows Mobile phones. All with differences that make them slightly incompatible.
On top, I have heard (third hand comments I can't assure validity off) I understand Android versions are not very backwards compatible. With the iPhone or Windows, most of the time you make an iOS 3 or WinXP application and chances are it will work with little testing in iOS4 and Win7 respectively. I heard off (third party yada yada) many developers forced to make heavy code change for their apps to run in the latest versions without breaking compatibility with older versions, that's without getting into different device flavors.
So how is this different to developing games/apps for the desktop (or, hell, laptop, tablet, netbook variants thereof), or every other phone OS other than iOS to date? Is this really a surprise to these people? If so they only have themselves to blame for going into the market blindly, as I'd have thought this would be self evident to anyone developing for an OS that's deployed to multiple hardware platforms.
You are almost right. For the most part, there are only 3 OS versions you can expect desktop users to be running (WinXP, Win7-32 and Win7-64.) Then comes the huge array of hardware differences, though.
But as I said, you are almost right. Android is like Windows. iPhone is like the XBox or PS3. Develop a game for an XBox or PS3 and you are sure it will run on all of them. The iPhone has a tiny level of feature fragmentation that is not as different as seeing XBoxes with or without hard drive. Actually, the speed of some versions may work as a target, but also the versions are so limited you can still pick the minimum generation device to support and go from there without headaches.
Actually, thinking it about it, due to OS versions, developing for the Android is more comparable to developing for Linux and expecting it to work flawlessly in every single Linux distro and configuration. Developing for Windows Phone 7 may be more comparable to developing for the Windows Desktop.
That being said, there is a reason why the console gaming market is way larger than the PC market. There will always be publishers that make cool games for PC thanks to the freedom to develop and self publish, but most of the developers will first do their thing for the iPhone and just risk porting to Android if they see huge success with that platform.
That is the beauty, for developers, the iOS offers. That's why there are so many apps and so much movement in the iPhone's app store.
I think it's about time we had viable alternatives for those products. Even the best photoshop alternatives I seen are still very limited. As for Illustrator... darn do I miss Freehand...
Other than that, nothing would kill Flash faster than an Adobe/Microsoft merger, so I guess not everything would be bad news.
but best buy is pre loading it and forcing you to buy it with work done and non pre loading ones are out of stock.
and then when you try to buy they push a $50-$80 monster HDMI cable on you.
Then your complaint is not that they are charging for pre-installing updates, but instead that they have a tendency to preemptively do this for all their stock and "force" clients into the service by not having any un-serviced units up for sale.
If that's your real complaint, then you should complain about that, not about the service being provided for a fee.
There are more people who will ditch AT&T for Verizon than there are people who will ditch Android for iPhone, for the simple fact that the U.S. isn't the whole world. Also, some people dislike the need for going through a goddamn 12 step program just to change the ringtone. For a few things where there's money involved for Apple, the iPhone is remarkably user hostile.
12 step?
Settings > Sounds > Ringtones > select ringtone from list and exit.
On android:
Settings > Sounds and Display > Phone Ringtone > select ringtone from list > OK > now exit.
Just one thing that tends to bug me a bit every time I hear the "they are not paying me" argument about the Apple/Sony/Nintendo/Xbox/Steam/Etc digital stores:
It may be true that they are not paying you, but they are stores. You can't force BestBuy to carry your products even if you give it to them free on some profit sharing scheme. True, these stores don't have the luxury of "unlimited shelving" digital stores have, but there is more to the story than just shelf space.
If I go to Best Buy and buy garbage (ignore for now they yield refunds for most inventory) and I let it go and my next purchase ends up being also garbage, soon I will start to think they just carry garbage and stop buying there.
In that same line, Apple, Sony, and any other digital store handler is forced to put at least some levels of standards for the products they carry. They really don't want to force users to dig through garbage or to buy buggy and/or spyware from their stores as it will eventually lead people to stop trusting them and therefore stop buying from them.
Sure, Apple could open up the doors to other competitor stores inside their devices (entirely separate topic, though) but what's the use? How many you think will buy through those channels?
I doubt opening the doors for other stores would make the average user bother installing that additional store. Mostly just the same type of user that jailbreaks would bother getting and browsing the store.
I do not disagree [with Apple] personally about iTunes as a syncing tool. I do wish there was more programmable on how to sync my own app's files, though. App file sync is very well hidden and iTunes does not automatically sync the sandbox files, making it easy to loose things like game saves.
As an iPhone user that has jailbroken I can tell you I don't trust the stuff in the Cydia or Rock stores to spend money there. I no longer jailbreak, I used to do so to get multi-tasking, and that's no longer a reason.
I will agree there are some things Apple could improve. Some sort of Shared Document folder would be interesting, but at the same time potentially problematic when it comes to messy applications and uninstalls. Would not be shocked if that became The Big New Feature of iOS5 or 6.
The volume control is a policy thing. Apple may someday change policy, but currently they have a strict policy on the use of the volume controls. Anyone that uses the volume control for anything else knows very well their app will not be approved. I actually wish they changed that rule someday as it would be very useful for gaming to adopt the volume controls for input, but it's far from something that would make me hate them.
At the end of the day, Apple is way friendlier and open than Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft with the Xbox will ever be, and he mention these just in passing. That, just does not compute, unless Apple has personally rejected one of his apps and he are holding a grudge on it.
When will Apple learn what Nintendo learned back in the 90s, consumers don't like censorship and will but their games from the platform that doesn't have censorship.
Apple does not censor products. They have a very clear list of what they will not allow, and its not even that drastic of a list. Just no porn, yet you can get the porn through their browser, uncensored. They just won't sell the porn to you through their service.
The only case of "censorship" that you could note is the one about some cartoonist strip being rejected, and Jobs talked about that already, they had strict rules about defamation. This rule has since (before any news actually came out, in between rejection and news coming out) been updated to add a specific exception to things like political cartoons and comic strips.
Also you have to note the difference between not allowing certain type of content in your store to censoring. If a children store does not carry pornographic toys, it's not because they are censoring pornography, they are just not carrying it. Now, if a magazine stand carried playboy and censored all the nipples with a marker, that would be censoring.
Only that you went back to mention Scripting under CLI. True, every OS I seen that implements it allows for it to be scripted, but this is not necessarily true.
An application can be written with dual interfaces, GUI + CLI (at least in windows) and [arguably] bad design can lead the CLI to require a user to confirm actions without allowing the confirmation to be scripted.
On a similar line, I have seen GUI programs that have designed CLI equivalents for every menu and button with confirmation bypass parameters.
As you said at first, in the end, it's just a third tool, one meant for programmers or at least power users with at least minimal programming experience.
This will sound odd, but there are users that can work a CLI but can never ever program a single line of code. I worked in a company that has a completely CLI collection software. Not only is it impossible to script, but everyone uses it yet these are people that can't get the difference between shutdown and hibernate.
The curse of late posting, this is likely not going to be read by anyone but I can't help it:
The CLI (command Line Interface) does not make things any easier than the GUI. What makes the CLI easier is the existence of things like.bat files (in windows) that will be interpreted as a sequence of commands.
At the end of the day, the one that goes on writing some script that tells the OS to execute a list of commands is not a virtue of the CLI but just result of a programmable operative system. Throughout the years I have done the same thing with a lot of different systems. All the way to 1997 doing Apple Scripts that would run on every machine in my network to configure all machines identically, making VBS scripts to do updates, or even making user friendly Excel sheets with VBA that allow users to easily change programmable cells and then execute VBA across a whole network or huge list of replicating SQL servers.
In sake of redundancy: this has nothing to do with the interface and all to do with the OS providing users/administrator with quick and easy to use scripting tools that allow programmable automation of common processes, without forcing them to jump into compiled languages.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, Sun never supported Java on the Mac, Apple did. Apple provided the developers, the tools, apple did all the work, and then paid Sun for the privilege. (it costs money to make sure your JVM was approved).
With oracle now suing every other Java implementation out there that wasn't approved Apple probably thought it just wasn't worth it. Expensive to do, costs money to do it, and unless your sending money up to oracle yearly, now a patent nightmare mess.
Look at it this way a side effect might be that Oracle stops suing non oracle approved JVM's, including Davik. The Bad press might be more than they realize.
I was thinking the same thing. Oracle is becoming too lawyer-trigger happy with Java, and even if I was "safe" under some agreement I still would back out before they found a loophole to try to sue me over too. Besides, there is heavy chance their licensing agreement has ties to OS versions, and the upcoming Lion OSX forced revisions with terms Apple did not agree with.
Thing is apple's app store is not meant to be a repository in that sense, but simply a store. The app store is just a virtual Walmart for mac software.
If the mac community wants a linux style repository, its best for the community to create it. I wont be shocked if this inspires a Cydia and/or Rock port for OSX.
The big difference is that the Linux distros all have a method for including other repositories as well - you don't have to "submit" an app to an official Ubuntu, Fedora, etc, repo.
You mean like Steam, the second (that I can recall) app repository available for mac specialicing in gaming? Or Direct2Drive, MacGameStore, GamersGate, Deliver2Mac. These are all game based ones, but being a desktop, you can offer any third party managed mac app repository you want. All have their own Q&A process and rules for acceptance. You are much more likely to get a game into the Apple App Store than into Steam or any of the above listed app stores.
Apple should allow users to configure 3rd party app repositories and allow them to use Launchpad and auto-update as well.
My memory may be faulty, but I saw the keynote and Jobs said you could add apps to the launchpad. He didn't say at all that it was only for App Store apps.
And as noted above, nothing stops you from installing a front end for any repository you want that may be available. They could even buy ads in App Store ad space (because you can be sure, there will be free apps that finance themselves through advertisement)
It will indeed be less attractive to get an app from other sources.
However, I watched the entire keynote and as far as I recall, Steve said "you can add your apps to the launchpad."
That being told, the Launchapd is just like the Homescreen in my iPhone, and once I got 3 screens worth of apps I found it to be faster to use Spotlight to find the app I want to run. Guess what? Spotlight is already the way I do the same things on my mac.
I don't think the Launchpad will be the ultimate way to launch apps in the future, at least it wont be for me. I already use the desktop for similar results anyways.
All that aside, yea, going back to the attractiveness, App Store distributed apps will indeed be preferred. It will be the first spot for many to look up apps before they reach out to the web. I don't think this will bury non-app store apps, though. At least not for popular apps. I see most free software ending up in the app store for easy access.
Perhaps big software like Photoshop and Office wont make it, mainly because they will refuse to agree with the "buy once, run on any machine you own" policy. At the same time, I look forward for people that start developing small Photoshop alternatives because now they have an easy way to spread their product, selling it for a very affordable amount, and being founded by night-micro transaction income, being able to grow into worthwhile rivals.
And they built it for good reason, too. Have you seen what they put under that place-marker? There's a prison whose sole purpose is to absolutely contain the most feared creature in the universe.
Er, so said the British TV show, anyway.
I saw that documentary too!!! Very educative!
Agreed, I myself fall in that group. I just think it's a minority group.
So iOS is definitely a bad choice for users who want to tweak. However, despite allowing users to tweak, Android is not a bad choice for people who just want the device to work.
The "just works" category tends to be heavily aimed at downloaded apps. I don't know what is the difference, but my older brother has an HTC Incredible, and the younger an Evo. Both tend to often find software that run in one but not the other. That is what I mean by "just works", Apple's closed system does it's best to make sure apps run in their OS. Only gotcha is they don't tend to go through all approved apps after updates, and some of these updates may occasionally break an old app.
As far as tweaking, though, out of the box the Android allows much more tweaking, but it's not like the iOS can't be hacked into allowing a very similar level of openness (as long as you don't want to make your own branch of the OS itself)
There is a lot of tweaking you can do on an iOS if you jailbreak, I personally prefer not to since most of the "open" stuff in Cydia tends to be buggy like hell.
If someone wanted to make the "Game Genie" nowadays, Nintendo would sue them into oblivion and prevent it from ever happening.
Dude... they did. Back in the day when "no one cared"
And that "n00b" will find that competing at that level will not be conducive to fun and will likely be eliminated from any waged competition early on.
Not if he is cheating and no one gets to catch him doing so.
PCs are, for the most part, just hardware fragmented. The OS of the standard PC tends to be a fairly standardized version of Windows.
Android platform is seeing a much faster and much heavier fragmentation than the Windows Desktop has ever seen. If it keeps going this way much further, in 2 years people may as well forget about making Android Software and focus on making "HTC Incredible" software or "Evo" software, etc etc.
Integrated vs fragmented. He's just trying to redefine the terms in his favor.
Open > Closed
vs
Integrated > Fragmented
Well done Steve.
It all depends on who is buying, as he said: "When selling to users who want their devices to just work"
If you are a grandma that just got such a device, you will be on the "users who want their devices just to work" category. If you read slashdot, you are likely not in that category and instead in the "i want to tweak this thing to no end" category, in that case, obviously iOS devices are not for you.
You should see him speak at D8 It's not often but he does acknoledge here and there that they have to work harder (in things like wireless syncing.)
What's the difference?
I can see the source code for Android
Which (incidentally) is why it's open, and apple's offering isn't.
That makes the base OS open source. The device itself, is as open as the carrier will allow it to be.
is that it does not have a GPS chip. This makes all the location services not working. Would it work with +myfi?
Somehow Apple did not stress this point in feature difference when it released the iPads. I only found it out a while after I bought the wifi version.
It's in their website. http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/
Location:
* Wi-Fi
* Digital compass
* Assisted GPS (Wi-Fi + 3G model)
* Cellular (Wi-Fi + 3G model)
I was very clear about this when I got my Wi-Fi iPad. It still can point me in the map, exactly points at my apartment in a cramped up community, something I find very scary given the thing has no GPS. Didn't know you could get that much information out of your Wi-Fi alone.
Then 1.5 doesn't count since it's share is less than that of Vista (sitting at 13%)
It's not about share. Anyone that is running Vista can upgrade to Windows 7, as it's actually lighter than Vista. There are still Android devices out there with no way to upgrade because their providers don't offer a supported upgrade path.
Even then, though, as the article noted, there seem to be over 100 different versions of the OS. Every carrier makes their own version of each release, on top of the versions people install on their own into Windows Mobile phones. All with differences that make them slightly incompatible.
On top, I have heard (third hand comments I can't assure validity off) I understand Android versions are not very backwards compatible. With the iPhone or Windows, most of the time you make an iOS 3 or WinXP application and chances are it will work with little testing in iOS4 and Win7 respectively. I heard off (third party yada yada) many developers forced to make heavy code change for their apps to run in the latest versions without breaking compatibility with older versions, that's without getting into different device flavors.
So how is this different to developing games/apps for the desktop (or, hell, laptop, tablet, netbook variants thereof), or every other phone OS other than iOS to date? Is this really a surprise to these people? If so they only have themselves to blame for going into the market blindly, as I'd have thought this would be self evident to anyone developing for an OS that's deployed to multiple hardware platforms.
You are almost right. For the most part, there are only 3 OS versions you can expect desktop users to be running (WinXP, Win7-32 and Win7-64.) Then comes the huge array of hardware differences, though.
But as I said, you are almost right. Android is like Windows. iPhone is like the XBox or PS3. Develop a game for an XBox or PS3 and you are sure it will run on all of them. The iPhone has a tiny level of feature fragmentation that is not as different as seeing XBoxes with or without hard drive. Actually, the speed of some versions may work as a target, but also the versions are so limited you can still pick the minimum generation device to support and go from there without headaches.
Actually, thinking it about it, due to OS versions, developing for the Android is more comparable to developing for Linux and expecting it to work flawlessly in every single Linux distro and configuration. Developing for Windows Phone 7 may be more comparable to developing for the Windows Desktop.
That being said, there is a reason why the console gaming market is way larger than the PC market. There will always be publishers that make cool games for PC thanks to the freedom to develop and self publish, but most of the developers will first do their thing for the iPhone and just risk porting to Android if they see huge success with that platform.
That is the beauty, for developers, the iOS offers. That's why there are so many apps and so much movement in the iPhone's app store.
I think it's about time we had viable alternatives for those products. Even the best photoshop alternatives I seen are still very limited. As for Illustrator... darn do I miss Freehand...
Other than that, nothing would kill Flash faster than an Adobe/Microsoft merger, so I guess not everything would be bad news.
>Cartridge (ROM) based games are more expensive to manufacture than CD/DVDs. Perhaps a comparison of like for like would be better.
Ok, but what about the billions and billions of dollars they don't lose to piracy? Doesn't that factor into the pricing somehow?
A more accurate question is on game development budget. These days, the budget for games is extreme.
but best buy is pre loading it and forcing you to buy it with work done and non pre loading ones are out of stock.
and then when you try to buy they push a $50-$80 monster HDMI cable on you.
Then your complaint is not that they are charging for pre-installing updates, but instead that they have a tendency to preemptively do this for all their stock and "force" clients into the service by not having any un-serviced units up for sale.
If that's your real complaint, then you should complain about that, not about the service being provided for a fee.
First off, that's not "changing a ringtone", that's "creating a ringtone".
That aside, I just use free apps. You know, there is an app for that! Well, many apps for that!
There are more people who will ditch AT&T for Verizon than there are people who will ditch Android for iPhone, for the simple fact that the U.S. isn't the whole world. Also, some people dislike the need for going through a goddamn 12 step program just to change the ringtone. For a few things where there's money involved for Apple, the iPhone is remarkably user hostile.
12 step?
Settings > Sounds > Ringtones > select ringtone from list and exit.
On android:
Settings > Sounds and Display > Phone Ringtone > select ringtone from list > OK > now exit.
Just one thing that tends to bug me a bit every time I hear the "they are not paying me" argument about the Apple/Sony/Nintendo/Xbox/Steam/Etc digital stores:
It may be true that they are not paying you, but they are stores. You can't force BestBuy to carry your products even if you give it to them free on some profit sharing scheme. True, these stores don't have the luxury of "unlimited shelving" digital stores have, but there is more to the story than just shelf space.
If I go to Best Buy and buy garbage (ignore for now they yield refunds for most inventory) and I let it go and my next purchase ends up being also garbage, soon I will start to think they just carry garbage and stop buying there.
In that same line, Apple, Sony, and any other digital store handler is forced to put at least some levels of standards for the products they carry. They really don't want to force users to dig through garbage or to buy buggy and/or spyware from their stores as it will eventually lead people to stop trusting them and therefore stop buying from them.
Sure, Apple could open up the doors to other competitor stores inside their devices (entirely separate topic, though) but what's the use? How many you think will buy through those channels?
I doubt opening the doors for other stores would make the average user bother installing that additional store. Mostly just the same type of user that jailbreaks would bother getting and browsing the store.
I do not disagree [with Apple] personally about iTunes as a syncing tool. I do wish there was more programmable on how to sync my own app's files, though. App file sync is very well hidden and iTunes does not automatically sync the sandbox files, making it easy to loose things like game saves.
As an iPhone user that has jailbroken I can tell you I don't trust the stuff in the Cydia or Rock stores to spend money there. I no longer jailbreak, I used to do so to get multi-tasking, and that's no longer a reason.
I will agree there are some things Apple could improve. Some sort of Shared Document folder would be interesting, but at the same time potentially problematic when it comes to messy applications and uninstalls. Would not be shocked if that became The Big New Feature of iOS5 or 6.
The volume control is a policy thing. Apple may someday change policy, but currently they have a strict policy on the use of the volume controls. Anyone that uses the volume control for anything else knows very well their app will not be approved. I actually wish they changed that rule someday as it would be very useful for gaming to adopt the volume controls for input, but it's far from something that would make me hate them.
At the end of the day, Apple is way friendlier and open than Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft with the Xbox will ever be, and he mention these just in passing. That, just does not compute, unless Apple has personally rejected one of his apps and he are holding a grudge on it.
When will Apple learn what Nintendo learned back in the 90s, consumers don't like censorship and will but their games from the platform that doesn't have censorship.
Apple does not censor products. They have a very clear list of what they will not allow, and its not even that drastic of a list. Just no porn, yet you can get the porn through their browser, uncensored. They just won't sell the porn to you through their service.
The only case of "censorship" that you could note is the one about some cartoonist strip being rejected, and Jobs talked about that already, they had strict rules about defamation. This rule has since (before any news actually came out, in between rejection and news coming out) been updated to add a specific exception to things like political cartoons and comic strips.
Also you have to note the difference between not allowing certain type of content in your store to censoring. If a children store does not carry pornographic toys, it's not because they are censoring pornography, they are just not carrying it. Now, if a magazine stand carried playboy and censored all the nipples with a marker, that would be censoring.
Only that you went back to mention Scripting under CLI. True, every OS I seen that implements it allows for it to be scripted, but this is not necessarily true.
An application can be written with dual interfaces, GUI + CLI (at least in windows) and [arguably] bad design can lead the CLI to require a user to confirm actions without allowing the confirmation to be scripted.
On a similar line, I have seen GUI programs that have designed CLI equivalents for every menu and button with confirmation bypass parameters.
As you said at first, in the end, it's just a third tool, one meant for programmers or at least power users with at least minimal programming experience.
This will sound odd, but there are users that can work a CLI but can never ever program a single line of code. I worked in a company that has a completely CLI collection software. Not only is it impossible to script, but everyone uses it yet these are people that can't get the difference between shutdown and hibernate.
The curse of late posting, this is likely not going to be read by anyone but I can't help it:
The CLI (command Line Interface) does not make things any easier than the GUI. What makes the CLI easier is the existence of things like .bat files (in windows) that will be interpreted as a sequence of commands.
At the end of the day, the one that goes on writing some script that tells the OS to execute a list of commands is not a virtue of the CLI but just result of a programmable operative system. Throughout the years I have done the same thing with a lot of different systems. All the way to 1997 doing Apple Scripts that would run on every machine in my network to configure all machines identically, making VBS scripts to do updates, or even making user friendly Excel sheets with VBA that allow users to easily change programmable cells and then execute VBA across a whole network or huge list of replicating SQL servers.
In sake of redundancy: this has nothing to do with the interface and all to do with the OS providing users/administrator with quick and easy to use scripting tools that allow programmable automation of common processes, without forcing them to jump into compiled languages.