Woz buys iTunes Store music for the same reason he stood in line: to be part of today's experience.
Woz already had 2 iPhones at home when he went to the mall. He went because that is his childhood mall and he wanted to remember the day the iPhone was released as geek day at the mall, everybody excited just to open the box and be one of the first to try the new kit.
Not only is the DRM in iTunes temporary, but it has already been removed from 1/5 of the major labels. In addition, you could always break it by simply burning a CD.
DRM is no good for Apple. Look at Sony... the reason Apple ate their lunch was because Sony's content arm didn't have to reach very far to strangle their consumer electronics division.
Well, you could have one but it wouldn't function for more than like an hour until somebody cracked it.
Even closed-source DRM is cracked regularly.
DRM is about hiding a particular switch from you, the one that cuts off music or movie playback if certain preset parameters are not satisfied. If all you have to do to find that switch is read the source code, which is a list of switches being thrown, then the DRM will not have its secret switch very long at all.
> Gates is Jobs, not Woz. He's not really credited with directly contributing much, if anything, to the field of software or hardware.
You're right that Gates position at Microsoft is analagous to Jobs at Apple, with Paul Allen being Woz, but Jobs is certainly credited with contributing to software and hardware, only as a designer, not as an engineer. Compare the enclosure of the Apple I (Woz) with the enclosure of the Apple II (Jobs) and ask yourself if Jobs helped.
It's the same delusion as the AppleTV as a $299 Mac. Then you look inside and see the part they left out was the CPU, it is all GPU in there, all video decoding, and hardly any brain.
The iPhone gets hot when you use it as directed, and sometimes you can outrun the interface and see an artifact. It is using its full capacity and when we think about it we should not be surprised. Don't think of the still photos, look at how the interface moves around, it is working hard already.
> It could be possible that iTunes gets the password from an Apple server at the time that it would be restoring the firmware. It could be over https > then it's reasonably secure although I'm sure someone could still figure out how to get it.
This wouldn't be a surprise because iTunes is supposed to maintain the phone, there is no reason for the phone to be smart enough to get itself into trouble, that is the lesson of the iPod, they left all this stuff out and put it in iTunes instead so the device was simple and easy to use, just for playback.
> The iPhone is also quite obviously very expensive.
The iPhone literally costs less than $1 per day. That is how the 8 GB model's sales are recorded, as $29.13 per month for two years.
They include over $300 in software that you have to buy separately for Windows Mobile, and they include software updates with new features for two years also.
> It may have superior features
It also has features nobody else has, which is a different thing. If you want a real Web browser in your pocket you choose iPhone. If you want to touch your music, again it is iPhone.
> but it's pretty close to a middle-of-the-road product in terms of value
I would love to know which phones are more valuable in your opinion.
> The fact that the IPhone has the potential for 10's of millions of sales, and is so portable compared to a web surfing, music playing PC
In the same way that music producers used to think of the CD player as their platform but now think of the iPod, Web developers are going to stop developing for the PC and make content for Web 2.0 mobiles like iPhone and all of the coming iPhone style mobiles, which every maker has said they are working on, although Nokia is furthest along.
You'll still be able to run the Web on your PC of course, just like you can listen to music in iTunes, but that is secondary to the smaller device. The reason is that there are so many more mobiles than PC's even now and only getting worse. As they all get browsers the Web moves off the PC.
$249 - 8 GB iPod nano $99 - generic phone $800 - generic PC notebook with Firefox and Wi-Fi and HTML email with attachments ------ $1149
That does not include I-T and it does not all fit in your pocket.
For most people, iPhone is cheaper than what they had, easier than what they had, much smaller than what they had.
I usually have a desktop and a notebook but my notebook retired recently and I'm replacing it with an iPhone because it does all the stuff I do on a notebook anyway and where it lacks at something it makes up by being pocket-sized and zero I-T.
> I think it's possible that a next Killer App can come out within 3 years
Web 2.0 on billions of mobiles, dwarfing the personal computer installed base... I think that is the most significant thing right now and for the next few years. By 2010, PC's may be the minority of Google's clients.
There was a few years there where we all played MP3's on our computers. During that time we may have been tempted to imagine every CD player in the world being replaced by a PC (Bill Gates certainly did). However what happened is the CD players were replaced by iPods, both portable and home CD players. The Web is the same, it is stuck on the PC only temporarily. Both Apple and Nokia have mobile Web browsers based on WebKit, which is full-spec, it even has CSS3. Internet Explorer will be a minority browser in no time and it is stuck on the PC. Most Web users will be on mobiles soon and from then on.
Steve Jobs already confirmed the next iPod video runs OS X. Probably has Safari and Wi-Fi also. Half an iPhone for $349 with the flash replaced by disk.
> cross-platform
If you do one Web-native GUI you can run it on the Web as well as use it for the UI for your native apps. So your app can run on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Web 2.0. I say Web 2.0 because you want CSS3 for sure, with its shadows and rounded boxes and inset text, you can do the entire iTunes UI in HTML5+JS+CSS3.
> GTK and QT
This is all going away in favor of HTML5, JS, CSS3 even on native apps. The apps you see coming out of these toolkits look like 1988's ass. Maybe if you are making a disk utility or something, but even then some art or animation can be amazingly useful.
To see the future, look at Adobe Lightroom, which although the UI is in Lua it is still entirely scripted. They were able to make massive UI changes from beta to beta based on feedback in very short time, they were able to include tons of artwork for a very distinctive and functional custom interface where the photos always seem to be real objects, and the same interface runs on both Mac and Windows in exactly the same way (and wherever else they take it). Also, the artists and UI people worked on the art and UI while the coders worked on code, it was separate just like how we do it on the Web.
QT has an imitation Mac GUI that even Apple doesn't use anymore. You are much better off giving your app its own distinctive, custom, media-rich UI.
Years ago on the Mac, every application had the same icon, an offset square that meant "application". Now we would laugh at the idea of not putting your own custom icon on your app after you did all the coding and libraries and design and QA and all of that. The same applies to your entire UI. The window your app is running in can be iconic also. That's the face of your app and also all of its controls.
You can prototype the UI in a browser so quickly, refine it until everyone on the team feels like that is the 2.0 interface right there, that is speaking to us all. You can skip thousands of lines of code that way by not writing any until the UI is essentially done.
Also, let's say you make an app with QT and it does the same things on Mac, Windows, Linux, but in each place it looks different. To many Slashdot readers, that is the same app. To the other 98% of humans, different app. Same as how the antique Web rendering on non-Apple mobiles is only considered to be the Web by a small cadre of technical users. To most people, it ain't the Web if you don't have what the iPhone has. You are better to give your user one app and one UI that works the same on every platform and then if they buy a Mac or Windows or Linux they can still work in e.g. Lightroom at full productivity. Also, you are not constrained by poor UI decisions that one platform makes, you customize what you're doing to the needs of your app.
The best part of this is that the core operating system recedes behind your app's interface. Whatever it is under there, your code uses it, but the user a
> The proportion of Windoze only developers just lurched 11% down to 65%. Give it a year or two and they will be less than 50%.
In a year or two, Windows may be less than 50% of the Web also now that phones are getting real browsers. It's going to be harder and harder to convince people to use the backslash.
As an aside, when somebody says "forward slash" to me I immediately write them off as an idiot and I have never regretted it.
> And that exploration of the nuts and bolts of an overcomplicated [Windows] desktop OS gave me insights that I may never have gained had I stuck with the more opaque Mac OS
The overcomplicated state of Windows has done more to turn people off computers than it has to help them. There are only a paltry 500 million personal computers in the world, that is abject failure on the part of the 30 year old personal computer industry. There are 4x as many phones right now and everyone will tell you phones suck. Microsoft is to blame for a lot of the PC's unpopularity. People fucking HATE them. Just stop making excuses for Microsoft. The PC is fucked right now and the Web moving to phones can't happen fast enough.
Also your remark is bigoted: 1) coding is just one way to use a computer, and it is only a solution to a minority of tasks, and 2) you obviously know nothing about Mac OS.
> The best thing about the rise of the PC was that it gave people access to a machine that could be configured to do a lot of different things, > including "learn about making your own applications".
Here is how you make your own application on the Mac:
- launch Script Editor (the Mac shell since System 7 in like 1992) - write AppleScript code - click "Compile" (it is instant) - choose File > Save As - specify "Application" - give your new application a name - click OK - in Finder, locate your new application and launch it - enjoy
I'm a graphic artist, I went to art school not CS, didn't even use a computer until I was 21, and yet I make 50+ Mac apps per year that do the work of an entire other graphic artist, using nothing but the built-in tools in Mac OS. Sometimes an app only takes a half hour to develop and it saves me days and days of laborious, repetitive work. Some apps take as much as a week to develop, but they do a week of work in one hour the first time you use them, then every other time it is just gravy.
With AppleScript development, the applications on your system become libraries for your own apps. So even though you only wrote 20 lines of code and it only took a half hour, the app you create write JPEG's with Photoshop, writes MPEG-4 movies with QuickTime, creates folders and moves files around using Finder, converts EPS to SVG using Illustrator, runs Unix shell scripts using the command line, and so on, all in the same little rapidly-developed AppleScript app, so you get out very high quality products with very little work.
Maybe that is just the Mac being opaque to you, but I can tell you I go to Photoshop conferences and I sincerely want to know what Photoshop-Windows users are using to automate Photoshop since they don't have AppleScript. For example, converting 500 camera photos into 500 Web photos 1/8th of the size with 1/8th inch border and logo watermark is really time-consuming and error-prone if you try to do it manually, you want to write some code that describes the above task and have Photoshop do the task once on the first photo, then once on the second photo, etc. What I have found is that Photoshop-Windows users, when faced with a task like that, go out and buy yet another photo editing app that specializes in converting batches of photos and they take whatever options are in there and make the best of it. They don't get the exact watermark they wanted, necessarily, and the files they create are not as high-quality as Photoshop creates, and they also spend hundreds of dollars on these useless apps.
It is Windows that is opaque, in my opinion. Especially if you're not an MSDN member C software developer. Windows users are not supposed to develop their own custom software, they're supposed to buy software from Microsoft's developers developers developers.
I mean, Tim Berners-Lee is a physicist who had an idea for a software app and wrote it himself on a NeXT machine and it became Microsoft's worst nightmare. Those same tools have been on the Mac since 1999, how opaque is that?
> You really think that Apple has created zero-emission, 100 mpg auto fuel?
I didn't start the ridiculous car/gasoline analogy. I have no idea what next-generation auto fuel is, I don't even know how to drive a car. The point was that Apple's stuff is next generation over the competition and that is a reason not only to buy it over something else but to recommend it over something else.
Do you really think the Web 0.5 (WML or just the text from a page) on current mobiles is equivalent to the Web 2.0 desktop-level rendering and better than IE Windows features on the iPhone? Or is it "next-generation"? I know "mobile" Web developers who put down their Web 0.5 tools last January never to pick them up again and now they are making Web 2.0 mobile apps for iPhone knowing that Nokia and everyone else will run them eventually also. Forget about Web 1.0, that never came to mobiles at all.
Mobiles are not dominated by any one company like the PC, and they also vastly outnumber the PC. Within a few years the PC will be a small minority of Web clients. The iPhone signals the end of a single vendor dominating the Web.
No more gasoline.
> Maybe Apple has "Techron." Oh boy! Techron!
No, Techron is Pocket IE, more marketing than technology. Web 2.0 on mobiles changes the entire Web. Nokia is using the same browser engine as Apple because it's open source. All phone makers are making Web 2.0 browsers because that is how the mobile apps are being made right now, a Web 1.0 browser on a mobile can't run the iPhone-optimized apps that are coming out right now, months before the other phone makers catch up.
> I'm a veteran of the OS/2 advocacy wars
Then you know what it's like to try and replace v1 with v1.1 and nobody's buying. You have to make stuff 10x better, clearly next-generation, to replace an entrenched standard. iPhone is clearly 10x better than a WML browser, Mac OS X is clearly 10x better than Windows Vista in every way except hardware-partner-licensing.
I don't advocate any technology. However I'm a creative professional, and I actually use about 20 features of the Mac that simply don't exist anywhere else. I can demonstrate the productivity gains I get from running Photoshop on Mac instead of Windows. If you use an Art Tablet, Exposé's activation corners are the corners of the Art Tablet, it is ridiculously fast and productive, worth switching to Mac for alone, never mind color management and AppleScript and so many other things.
> Lots of smartphones give you the internet in your pocket
Yes, they give you INTERNET but they do not give you the World Wide Web. They most especially do not give you Web 2.0 or the same rendering engine from a PC. Only nerds can use the Internet without the Web. Do not try to tell me that Web 1994 from other phones is equivalent to Web 2007 on the iPhone, it is not. You go to Flickr on iPhone and it is Flickr. A child would recognize it and can use it. Saying that non-iPhone phones "have the Web" is disingenuous and ALWAYS disappoints consumers, who are not impressed that you retrieved 1/3 of a Web site and showed them the text from it. They simply do not consider that to be the Web any more than a storyboard is a movie.
You can complain about the phone, email, iPod, not being revolutionary all you want, fair enough, but it is patently absurd to deny that the browser in iPhone is novel and unique. It has changed Web development entirely, even now. In December 2006 we had Web 1.0 for PC's and WML for mobiles, in January 2007 that changed to Web 2.0 for both mobiles and PC's. The reason is that phones already outnumber PC's by 4:1 and it is expected to be 8:1 by 2010, and phones are adding Web 2.0 browsers, not Web 1.0 like Microsoft, because they want to run "iPhone apps", the new mobile apps being created specifically for iPhone using the Web 2.0 specifications. Nokia is closest to running them on a phone after Apple, so watch for them, but all of the phone manufacturers have already said they're working on "iPhone-style Web browsing" for their phones because that's the part of iPhone that people are going crazy for. Nokia is using WebKit, the same engine as iPhone uses, others are using Firefox no doubt. There is no Microsoft product for them to choose from, even Microsoft's PC browser cannot run "iPhone apps."
Developers, developers, developers... all rushing right now to make content for a Web that is 10x the size of the current one within 5 years. What helps is many of us learned Web 2.0 already for Safari/Firefox 1 and 2, now we feel like we are turned loose by the iPhone.
> The iPhone is like a lot of other Apple-products: a compromise
It's called "design." The same principles are behind it as "pick two: fast, easy, or cheap." It's less about compromise and more about reality.
Everything on iPhone runs as root, it is like Windows XP in there. Apple is not going to replicate what Windows XP did to the Internet and Microsoft's reputation (such as it was) with iPhone. If you get some malware on your phone, the way you may find out is your monthly bill comes and you've got $10,000 in 900 calls that you didn't know about. Or your phone service will be cut off and you'll call AT&T saying "what the hell?" and they'll say your credit is hosed brother, put down that iPhone, no more phone sex for you.
The iPhone supports Web 2.0, iPod dock connector, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi accessories. That is a lot more love than many pocket devices. There are 3000 iPod accessories that already work with iPhone, even a sex toy.
The native apps thing strikes me as the same as the internal battery controversy. I read an article where the guy said the reason he doesn't like the internal battery is that you can't carry a spare. But he is entirely and completely wrong. The iPod also has an internal battery, yet you can buy a dock with a built-in battery that lasts for days and days. There are huge battery packs like a briefcase with an iPod connector coming off them. They all work on iPhone. The internal battery only removes the ability to run with zero batteries, it doesn't stop you from running with 8 or 10 and you can just plug them on, not opening a case, not fucking around, and maybe the best part is that when the external battery dies, your internal battery is fully charged, it acts like a reserve battery, you won't even have to stop your current call or movie. If the guy complaining about not having a spare really wanted a spare battery he would have asked "can I get a spare battery for my iPhone?" but I think he really just wanted to complain about the iPhone.
> What annoys some of us is that it's being presented as revolutionary. It's not.
No, what you're missing is that the iPhone IS a revolutionary device, but it IS NOT a revolutionary phone.
Phone in your pocket? Yawn.
iPod in your pocket? Yawn.
Email in your pocket? Yawn.
Desktop-level Web 2.0 in your pocket? Huge fucking deal. There has not even been desktop-level Web 1.0 in a phone yet. Nobody has done the equivalent of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows on a phone, that is Web 1.0 circa 2000 and here in 2007 we don't have that on a phone yet. What Apple just did was put Safari 3 in a phone, that is Web 2.0 2008 in a phone.
So what?
If the Web is confined to the PC, it is dominated by Microsoft. The biggest competitor to Web 2.0 is Microsoft Internet Explorer's Web 1.0. One company is holding back the whole Web right now because they see the Web as one piece of the PC. However, the iPhone reveals that it is the other way around: the PC is one part of the Web. Microsoft's domination of the Web is over, they are back to just dominating the typewriter market.
Phones are 4:1 over PC's right now, in a few years that is 8:1 and most of those phones will have Web 2.0 browsers, because Web 2.0 has replaced WML as the "mobile" Web standard. There are many mobile-oriented Web 2.0 "iPhone apps" right now and more to come and the only thing stopping any phone manufacturer from running them is their lack of a Web 2.0 browser. Well, WebKit and Mozilla are both Web 2.0 and open source so that isn't a very large hill to climb when your users are demanding pocket Web browsing. People are going to start using these iPhone apps on their phones and on their PC's they will have to start using Safari or Firefox in order to see them there, they won't work in Internet Explorer for Windows. IE will be seen to be the odd one out same as Windows is the odd one out in operating systems, everyone else is Unix compatible.
Microsoft relies on their PC market dominance to get Web developers to write lowest-common-denominator stuff that works in their quirky, non-standard, buggy, Web 1.0 browser which lacked active developers for 5 years. Between now and 2010, Internet Explorer will gradually drop from it's current 75% Web market share to under 50%, even if it maintains its dominance on the PC. People will have 2-3 Web browsers in their lives at that point, one in the phone, one on the TV, one on the PC, and they're going to see IE fucking up like it does because developers, especially small ones and bloggers, are not going to make a second site so that Windows users can avoid downloading 8 MB of Safari or 17 MB of Firefox.
Microsoft has not even started their Web 2.0 browser yet. Web rendering engines are like operating system kernels in that you put a small team to work for a number of years along with lots of feedback from users and finally you get something that works. You can't put 10,000 coders to work for a month and get back a new Web rendering engine with Web 2.0 standards support.
I've been making Web sites for years, and the only browser a client ever asked me specifically to support was Internet Explorer for Windows. A couple of days after the iPhone debut last January, six months before it shipped, a client asked me to make sure what we were making runs on iPhone. The torch is passed.
Exxon and Shell is the same like HP and Dell, your little drama is equivalent to Bob trying to get Glen to give up his Dell and buy an HP. What's the incentive?
If there were just ONE gas station that filled up your tank with clear liquid that gave you 100 miles to the gallon and zero pollution, now that would be something to tell your friends about, even recommend they give up spoiling the planet with gasoline.
First of all, every fanboy who is not the same kind of fanboy as you will seem creepy.
But more importantly, you overestimate the Apple fanboy effect. Many people buy Apple products because they're the only ones they can use because they're doctors or lawyers not CS grads. Many buy them for specific unique features such as CoreAudio for a music and audio pro, or the built-in iLife consumer media suite, or the best typography and publishing features. Many buy them because they tried one and liked it. Later they have positive opinions of the products because they work as advertised and there really isn't anything better out there for them if they need those features. HP and Dell make typewriters, that is very quaint but not appealing to an artist.
The people I watch out for are the ones who fill every computing need with a Windows PC by reflex and tell you all computers are the same. That is much worse than being a fanboy, who at least picked one thing out and said "I think that's better."
There is no hardware with 50% or more profit margin, that is ludicrous.
Attacking Apple's profit-margins is an age-old form of Microsoft FUD, anybody who does it is either disingenuous or clueless.
The way the scam works is you count the cost of Microsoft software as an expense for HP, Dell, Palm, etc. not as a profit for Microsoft. Then on the Apple side, the hardware profit (the HP/Dell/Palm part) is combined with Apple's software profit (the Microsoft part) to form a profit margin that every PC maker wishes they had but doesn't because they gave up making computers in order to be a Microsoft Hardware Partner, that is not as profitable as making computers. Software has much, much higher profit margins than hardware. If you don't even count the software profit on a non-Apple PC (the part that goes to Microsoft, the most profitable company ever in history with the largest cash hoard) then you are a disingenuous liar or a complete fool or both. You are not just hiding Microsoft's profit, you're hiding their 95% profit margin. It is very, very significant information to leave out, it is enough that you are lying by omission.
Same parts in a Mac as a PC, same parts in an iPhone as a Treo, on hardware it is a level playing field, not just by accident but because Apple wanted it that way. They could use any chip in a Mac, any chip in the iPhone, but they chose the same chip as every other PC maker, every other smart phone maker, it is level on parts and supplies and everything else. If you want to include the software profits, though, you have to bring Microsoft into the comparison.
> Anyway don't fool yourself that the iPhone is OSX. It's running on an ARM device, iPhone is as much OsX as windows smartphone is windows XP.
This is all just semantics. If you cut out some of Windows XP and call it "Windows XP Embedded" (Windows XP for embedding) or you cut out some of "Mac OS X" and call it "OS X" (OS X without the Mac) it is just a naming convention.
However I will say that iPhone looks like OS X to me, and I'm using Mac OS X every day since 2001. If Apple called it "iPhone OS" we would be saying that is just OS X ported to iPhone, not some new iPhone OS, who are you trying to fool? The Web rendering, typography, resolution-independent interface, animation, Unix flavors, compatibility with standards, even the little dock at the bottom all say "here is your OS X to go." If another company other than Apple did iPhone we would be saying iPhone is very OS X -inspired. Also, from the OS X crash logs you can clearly see that CoreFoundation and CoreAudio and other friends are there. iPhone also runs LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) to fool parts of OS X into thinking they're on a PC so that they didn't have to be rewritten.
Also notice that Mac OS X is about 2 GB and OS X is about 0.7 GB, so it is cut-down but not terribly so, because all of the devices OS X runs on (iPhone, AppleTV, next iPod) all have large storage. The Windows phone systems have storage measured in kilobytes or megabytes, not gigabytes. At the same time, OS X is much leaner than Windows, compare Safari on Windows (8 MB download) to Internet Explorer for Windows, and keep in mind Safari for Windows brings its own graphics and text rendering libraries from the Mac. So my point is that Apple's cut-down OS maintains much more of its original flavor. And from what I understand Windows and Windows CE are separate code bases, they are not the same except where they fool you into thinking they are. With OS X, where it is the same as the Mac it is because it actually still is the same. Where it is different there is a reason for it, e.g. only 8 Web pages open at once on iPhone due to limited resources, whereas on the Mac you can open 80 quite easily.
> the enormous implicit value of the already developed OS. The latter is free to them
Not really. It's not just sitting there "done" and they just install it. OS X is an ongoing development project that is funded by Apple and costs them a certain amount per year to maintain even if they never ship a new product with it all that year. Customizing it to port it to iPhone, AppleTV, and coming soon the iPod also had a significant cost. They even call it "OS X v1.0" in the iPhone although it is Leopard-related. There are new frameworks such as CoreTelephony and CoreSurface which do not exist on the Mac yet. They had to design that stuff and build it, not just buy it from someone else as a plug-in part.
(Yes, at the recent D conference Steve Jobs was running CoreSurface in his pocket when Bill Gates demoed the "innovative" Microsoft Surface retail kiosk platform.)
I don't think the leverage they have with OS X is in cost but rather in the ability to customize the entire device because they're building on so many mature and feature-rich frameworks. Whatever feature they want to add, the answer never comes back "Windows Mobile doesn't support that yet" or "you can't do that on Symbian." Also, Apple can "fine tune" the device, make software changes to work around hardware deficiencies. They can also introduce a feature in software when it makes sense or in hardware when it makes sense.
Other phone makers are like Web developers who only know HTML and CSS, no JavaScript... they will make a convoluted solution out of "pure" CSS that barely works when they could have used 10 lines of JavaScript to do it exactly right. If you look at a device as one thing, or the Web browser as one thing, then you want to get at every layer of it so you can build the best stuff. Apple takes a huge quality advantage by working with the whole device.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but don't be too hard on the guy. Even years after the Apple II was released, people were saying that Jobs and Woz were crazy.
Woz buys iTunes Store music for the same reason he stood in line: to be part of today's experience.
... the reason Apple ate their lunch was because Sony's content arm didn't have to reach very far to strangle their consumer electronics division.
Woz already had 2 iPhones at home when he went to the mall. He went because that is his childhood mall and he wanted to remember the day the iPhone was released as geek day at the mall, everybody excited just to open the box and be one of the first to try the new kit.
Not only is the DRM in iTunes temporary, but it has already been removed from 1/5 of the major labels. In addition, you could always break it by simply burning a CD.
DRM is no good for Apple. Look at Sony
> You can have open source DRM
Well, you could have one but it wouldn't function for more than like an hour until somebody cracked it.
Even closed-source DRM is cracked regularly.
DRM is about hiding a particular switch from you, the one that cuts off music or movie playback if certain preset parameters are not satisfied. If all you have to do to find that switch is read the source code, which is a list of switches being thrown, then the DRM will not have its secret switch very long at all.
> Gates is Jobs, not Woz. He's not really credited with directly contributing much, if anything, to the field of software or hardware.
You're right that Gates position at Microsoft is analagous to Jobs at Apple, with Paul Allen being Woz, but Jobs is certainly credited with contributing to software and hardware, only as a designer, not as an engineer. Compare the enclosure of the Apple I (Woz) with the enclosure of the Apple II (Jobs) and ask yourself if Jobs helped.
> As far as what Woz contributed: well, first and foremost, he created a floppy drive that could fit in a space smaller than carry-on luggage.
No no no no no no no you can't possibly say that "first and foremost" Woz created a floppy drive.
First and foremost he invented the friggin' PC. Have you heard of it?
On the day of the iPhone launch Steve Jobs confirmed that OS X is also in "some iPods we've been working on."
> there are people who want an iPhone to use it as an iPod and WiFi device without having to enter into a 2-year AT&T contract).
Just wait a few months and get a bug-fixed OS X in an iPod video with the same screen and Wi-Fi and Safari and 100 GB disk.
It's the same delusion as the AppleTV as a $299 Mac. Then you look inside and see the part they left out was the CPU, it is all GPU in there, all video decoding, and hardly any brain.
The iPhone gets hot when you use it as directed, and sometimes you can outrun the interface and see an artifact. It is using its full capacity and when we think about it we should not be surprised. Don't think of the still photos, look at how the interface moves around, it is working hard already.
> It could be possible that iTunes gets the password from an Apple server at the time that it would be restoring the firmware. It could be over https
> then it's reasonably secure although I'm sure someone could still figure out how to get it.
This wouldn't be a surprise because iTunes is supposed to maintain the phone, there is no reason for the phone to be smart enough to get itself into trouble, that is the lesson of the iPod, they left all this stuff out and put it in iTunes instead so the device was simple and easy to use, just for playback.
> The iPhone is also quite obviously very expensive.
The iPhone literally costs less than $1 per day. That is how the 8 GB model's sales are recorded, as $29.13 per month for two years.
They include over $300 in software that you have to buy separately for Windows Mobile, and they include software updates with new features for two years also.
> It may have superior features
It also has features nobody else has, which is a different thing. If you want a real Web browser in your pocket you choose iPhone. If you want to touch your music, again it is iPhone.
> but it's pretty close to a middle-of-the-road product in terms of value
I would love to know which phones are more valuable in your opinion.
> The fact that the IPhone has the potential for 10's of millions of sales, and is so portable compared to a web surfing, music playing PC
In the same way that music producers used to think of the CD player as their platform but now think of the iPod, Web developers are going to stop developing for the PC and make content for Web 2.0 mobiles like iPhone and all of the coming iPhone style mobiles, which every maker has said they are working on, although Nokia is furthest along.
You'll still be able to run the Web on your PC of course, just like you can listen to music in iTunes, but that is secondary to the smaller device. The reason is that there are so many more mobiles than PC's even now and only getting worse. As they all get browsers the Web moves off the PC.
> Doesn't the price tag already do that?
$249 - 8 GB iPod nano
$99 - generic phone
$800 - generic PC notebook with Firefox and Wi-Fi and HTML email with attachments
------
$1149
That does not include I-T and it does not all fit in your pocket.
For most people, iPhone is cheaper than what they had, easier than what they had, much smaller than what they had.
I usually have a desktop and a notebook but my notebook retired recently and I'm replacing it with an iPhone because it does all the stuff I do on a notebook anyway and where it lacks at something it makes up by being pocket-sized and zero I-T.
> I think it's possible that a next Killer App can come out within 3 years
... I think that is the most significant thing right now and for the next few years. By 2010, PC's may be the minority of Google's clients.
Web 2.0 on billions of mobiles, dwarfing the personal computer installed base
There was a few years there where we all played MP3's on our computers. During that time we may have been tempted to imagine every CD player in the world being replaced by a PC (Bill Gates certainly did). However what happened is the CD players were replaced by iPods, both portable and home CD players. The Web is the same, it is stuck on the PC only temporarily. Both Apple and Nokia have mobile Web browsers based on WebKit, which is full-spec, it even has CSS3. Internet Explorer will be a minority browser in no time and it is stuck on the PC. Most Web users will be on mobiles soon and from then on.
Steve Jobs already confirmed the next iPod video runs OS X. Probably has Safari and Wi-Fi also. Half an iPhone for $349 with the flash replaced by disk.
> cross-platform
If you do one Web-native GUI you can run it on the Web as well as use it for the UI for your native apps. So your app can run on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Web 2.0. I say Web 2.0 because you want CSS3 for sure, with its shadows and rounded boxes and inset text, you can do the entire iTunes UI in HTML5+JS+CSS3.
> GTK and QT
This is all going away in favor of HTML5, JS, CSS3 even on native apps. The apps you see coming out of these toolkits look like 1988's ass. Maybe if you are making a disk utility or something, but even then some art or animation can be amazingly useful.
To see the future, look at Adobe Lightroom, which although the UI is in Lua it is still entirely scripted. They were able to make massive UI changes from beta to beta based on feedback in very short time, they were able to include tons of artwork for a very distinctive and functional custom interface where the photos always seem to be real objects, and the same interface runs on both Mac and Windows in exactly the same way (and wherever else they take it). Also, the artists and UI people worked on the art and UI while the coders worked on code, it was separate just like how we do it on the Web.
QT has an imitation Mac GUI that even Apple doesn't use anymore. You are much better off giving your app its own distinctive, custom, media-rich UI.
Years ago on the Mac, every application had the same icon, an offset square that meant "application". Now we would laugh at the idea of not putting your own custom icon on your app after you did all the coding and libraries and design and QA and all of that. The same applies to your entire UI. The window your app is running in can be iconic also. That's the face of your app and also all of its controls.
You can prototype the UI in a browser so quickly, refine it until everyone on the team feels like that is the 2.0 interface right there, that is speaking to us all. You can skip thousands of lines of code that way by not writing any until the UI is essentially done.
Also, let's say you make an app with QT and it does the same things on Mac, Windows, Linux, but in each place it looks different. To many Slashdot readers, that is the same app. To the other 98% of humans, different app. Same as how the antique Web rendering on non-Apple mobiles is only considered to be the Web by a small cadre of technical users. To most people, it ain't the Web if you don't have what the iPhone has. You are better to give your user one app and one UI that works the same on every platform and then if they buy a Mac or Windows or Linux they can still work in e.g. Lightroom at full productivity. Also, you are not constrained by poor UI decisions that one platform makes, you customize what you're doing to the needs of your app.
The best part of this is that the core operating system recedes behind your app's interface. Whatever it is under there, your code uses it, but the user a
> The proportion of Windoze only developers just lurched 11% down to 65%. Give it a year or two and they will be less than 50%.
In a year or two, Windows may be less than 50% of the Web also now that phones are getting real browsers. It's going to be harder and harder to convince people to use the backslash.
As an aside, when somebody says "forward slash" to me I immediately write them off as an idiot and I have never regretted it.
> Also, if you do your program right, you shouldn't need a lot of UI developers.
Is this how Linux apps are made? Go figure.
The killer app for Linux on the desktop is obviously going to be a GPL license arbitrator.
> And that exploration of the nuts and bolts of an overcomplicated [Windows] desktop OS gave me insights that I may never have gained had I stuck with the more opaque Mac OS
The overcomplicated state of Windows has done more to turn people off computers than it has to help them. There are only a paltry 500 million personal computers in the world, that is abject failure on the part of the 30 year old personal computer industry. There are 4x as many phones right now and everyone will tell you phones suck. Microsoft is to blame for a lot of the PC's unpopularity. People fucking HATE them. Just stop making excuses for Microsoft. The PC is fucked right now and the Web moving to phones can't happen fast enough.
Also your remark is bigoted: 1) coding is just one way to use a computer, and it is only a solution to a minority of tasks, and 2) you obviously know nothing about Mac OS.
> The best thing about the rise of the PC was that it gave people access to a machine that could be configured to do a lot of different things,
> including "learn about making your own applications".
Here is how you make your own application on the Mac:
- launch Script Editor (the Mac shell since System 7 in like 1992)
- write AppleScript code
- click "Compile" (it is instant)
- choose File > Save As
- specify "Application"
- give your new application a name
- click OK
- in Finder, locate your new application and launch it
- enjoy
I'm a graphic artist, I went to art school not CS, didn't even use a computer until I was 21, and yet I make 50+ Mac apps per year that do the work of an entire other graphic artist, using nothing but the built-in tools in Mac OS. Sometimes an app only takes a half hour to develop and it saves me days and days of laborious, repetitive work. Some apps take as much as a week to develop, but they do a week of work in one hour the first time you use them, then every other time it is just gravy.
With AppleScript development, the applications on your system become libraries for your own apps. So even though you only wrote 20 lines of code and it only took a half hour, the app you create write JPEG's with Photoshop, writes MPEG-4 movies with QuickTime, creates folders and moves files around using Finder, converts EPS to SVG using Illustrator, runs Unix shell scripts using the command line, and so on, all in the same little rapidly-developed AppleScript app, so you get out very high quality products with very little work.
Maybe that is just the Mac being opaque to you, but I can tell you I go to Photoshop conferences and I sincerely want to know what Photoshop-Windows users are using to automate Photoshop since they don't have AppleScript. For example, converting 500 camera photos into 500 Web photos 1/8th of the size with 1/8th inch border and logo watermark is really time-consuming and error-prone if you try to do it manually, you want to write some code that describes the above task and have Photoshop do the task once on the first photo, then once on the second photo, etc. What I have found is that Photoshop-Windows users, when faced with a task like that, go out and buy yet another photo editing app that specializes in converting batches of photos and they take whatever options are in there and make the best of it. They don't get the exact watermark they wanted, necessarily, and the files they create are not as high-quality as Photoshop creates, and they also spend hundreds of dollars on these useless apps.
It is Windows that is opaque, in my opinion. Especially if you're not an MSDN member C software developer. Windows users are not supposed to develop their own custom software, they're supposed to buy software from Microsoft's developers developers developers.
I mean, Tim Berners-Lee is a physicist who had an idea for a software app and wrote it himself on a NeXT machine and it became Microsoft's worst nightmare. Those same tools have been on the Mac since 1999, how opaque is that?
> access to a machine that
> You really think that Apple has created zero-emission, 100 mpg auto fuel?
I didn't start the ridiculous car/gasoline analogy. I have no idea what next-generation auto fuel is, I don't even know how to drive a car. The point was that Apple's stuff is next generation over the competition and that is a reason not only to buy it over something else but to recommend it over something else.
Do you really think the Web 0.5 (WML or just the text from a page) on current mobiles is equivalent to the Web 2.0 desktop-level rendering and better than IE Windows features on the iPhone? Or is it "next-generation"? I know "mobile" Web developers who put down their Web 0.5 tools last January never to pick them up again and now they are making Web 2.0 mobile apps for iPhone knowing that Nokia and everyone else will run them eventually also. Forget about Web 1.0, that never came to mobiles at all.
Mobiles are not dominated by any one company like the PC, and they also vastly outnumber the PC. Within a few years the PC will be a small minority of Web clients. The iPhone signals the end of a single vendor dominating the Web.
No more gasoline.
> Maybe Apple has "Techron." Oh boy! Techron!
No, Techron is Pocket IE, more marketing than technology. Web 2.0 on mobiles changes the entire Web. Nokia is using the same browser engine as Apple because it's open source. All phone makers are making Web 2.0 browsers because that is how the mobile apps are being made right now, a Web 1.0 browser on a mobile can't run the iPhone-optimized apps that are coming out right now, months before the other phone makers catch up.
> I'm a veteran of the OS/2 advocacy wars
Then you know what it's like to try and replace v1 with v1.1 and nobody's buying. You have to make stuff 10x better, clearly next-generation, to replace an entrenched standard. iPhone is clearly 10x better than a WML browser, Mac OS X is clearly 10x better than Windows Vista in every way except hardware-partner-licensing.
I don't advocate any technology. However I'm a creative professional, and I actually use about 20 features of the Mac that simply don't exist anywhere else. I can demonstrate the productivity gains I get from running Photoshop on Mac instead of Windows. If you use an Art Tablet, Exposé's activation corners are the corners of the Art Tablet, it is ridiculously fast and productive, worth switching to Mac for alone, never mind color management and AppleScript and so many other things.
> Lots of smartphones give you the internet in your pocket
... all rushing right now to make content for a Web that is 10x the size of the current one within 5 years. What helps is many of us learned Web 2.0 already for Safari/Firefox 1 and 2, now we feel like we are turned loose by the iPhone.
Yes, they give you INTERNET but they do not give you the World Wide Web. They most especially do not give you Web 2.0 or the same rendering engine from a PC. Only nerds can use the Internet without the Web. Do not try to tell me that Web 1994 from other phones is equivalent to Web 2007 on the iPhone, it is not. You go to Flickr on iPhone and it is Flickr. A child would recognize it and can use it. Saying that non-iPhone phones "have the Web" is disingenuous and ALWAYS disappoints consumers, who are not impressed that you retrieved 1/3 of a Web site and showed them the text from it. They simply do not consider that to be the Web any more than a storyboard is a movie.
You can complain about the phone, email, iPod, not being revolutionary all you want, fair enough, but it is patently absurd to deny that the browser in iPhone is novel and unique. It has changed Web development entirely, even now. In December 2006 we had Web 1.0 for PC's and WML for mobiles, in January 2007 that changed to Web 2.0 for both mobiles and PC's. The reason is that phones already outnumber PC's by 4:1 and it is expected to be 8:1 by 2010, and phones are adding Web 2.0 browsers, not Web 1.0 like Microsoft, because they want to run "iPhone apps", the new mobile apps being created specifically for iPhone using the Web 2.0 specifications. Nokia is closest to running them on a phone after Apple, so watch for them, but all of the phone manufacturers have already said they're working on "iPhone-style Web browsing" for their phones because that's the part of iPhone that people are going crazy for. Nokia is using WebKit, the same engine as iPhone uses, others are using Firefox no doubt. There is no Microsoft product for them to choose from, even Microsoft's PC browser cannot run "iPhone apps."
Developers, developers, developers
> The iPhone is like a lot of other Apple-products: a compromise
It's called "design." The same principles are behind it as "pick two: fast, easy, or cheap." It's less about compromise and more about reality.
Everything on iPhone runs as root, it is like Windows XP in there. Apple is not going to replicate what Windows XP did to the Internet and Microsoft's reputation (such as it was) with iPhone. If you get some malware on your phone, the way you may find out is your monthly bill comes and you've got $10,000 in 900 calls that you didn't know about. Or your phone service will be cut off and you'll call AT&T saying "what the hell?" and they'll say your credit is hosed brother, put down that iPhone, no more phone sex for you.
The iPhone supports Web 2.0, iPod dock connector, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi accessories. That is a lot more love than many pocket devices. There are 3000 iPod accessories that already work with iPhone, even a sex toy.
The native apps thing strikes me as the same as the internal battery controversy. I read an article where the guy said the reason he doesn't like the internal battery is that you can't carry a spare. But he is entirely and completely wrong. The iPod also has an internal battery, yet you can buy a dock with a built-in battery that lasts for days and days. There are huge battery packs like a briefcase with an iPod connector coming off them. They all work on iPhone. The internal battery only removes the ability to run with zero batteries, it doesn't stop you from running with 8 or 10 and you can just plug them on, not opening a case, not fucking around, and maybe the best part is that when the external battery dies, your internal battery is fully charged, it acts like a reserve battery, you won't even have to stop your current call or movie. If the guy complaining about not having a spare really wanted a spare battery he would have asked "can I get a spare battery for my iPhone?" but I think he really just wanted to complain about the iPhone.
> That's why not having the SDK is such a buzz kill.
Everything in iPhone runs as root right now. The buzz kill would be third-party software that dials 900 numbers and you can't make it stop.
> What annoys some of us is that it's being presented as revolutionary. It's not.
No, what you're missing is that the iPhone IS a revolutionary device, but it IS NOT a revolutionary phone.
Phone in your pocket? Yawn.
iPod in your pocket? Yawn.
Email in your pocket? Yawn.
Desktop-level Web 2.0 in your pocket? Huge fucking deal. There has not even been desktop-level Web 1.0 in a phone yet. Nobody has done the equivalent of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows on a phone, that is Web 1.0 circa 2000 and here in 2007 we don't have that on a phone yet. What Apple just did was put Safari 3 in a phone, that is Web 2.0 2008 in a phone.
So what?
If the Web is confined to the PC, it is dominated by Microsoft. The biggest competitor to Web 2.0 is Microsoft Internet Explorer's Web 1.0. One company is holding back the whole Web right now because they see the Web as one piece of the PC. However, the iPhone reveals that it is the other way around: the PC is one part of the Web. Microsoft's domination of the Web is over, they are back to just dominating the typewriter market.
Phones are 4:1 over PC's right now, in a few years that is 8:1 and most of those phones will have Web 2.0 browsers, because Web 2.0 has replaced WML as the "mobile" Web standard. There are many mobile-oriented Web 2.0 "iPhone apps" right now and more to come and the only thing stopping any phone manufacturer from running them is their lack of a Web 2.0 browser. Well, WebKit and Mozilla are both Web 2.0 and open source so that isn't a very large hill to climb when your users are demanding pocket Web browsing. People are going to start using these iPhone apps on their phones and on their PC's they will have to start using Safari or Firefox in order to see them there, they won't work in Internet Explorer for Windows. IE will be seen to be the odd one out same as Windows is the odd one out in operating systems, everyone else is Unix compatible.
Microsoft relies on their PC market dominance to get Web developers to write lowest-common-denominator stuff that works in their quirky, non-standard, buggy, Web 1.0 browser which lacked active developers for 5 years. Between now and 2010, Internet Explorer will gradually drop from it's current 75% Web market share to under 50%, even if it maintains its dominance on the PC. People will have 2-3 Web browsers in their lives at that point, one in the phone, one on the TV, one on the PC, and they're going to see IE fucking up like it does because developers, especially small ones and bloggers, are not going to make a second site so that Windows users can avoid downloading 8 MB of Safari or 17 MB of Firefox.
Microsoft has not even started their Web 2.0 browser yet. Web rendering engines are like operating system kernels in that you put a small team to work for a number of years along with lots of feedback from users and finally you get something that works. You can't put 10,000 coders to work for a month and get back a new Web rendering engine with Web 2.0 standards support.
I've been making Web sites for years, and the only browser a client ever asked me specifically to support was Internet Explorer for Windows. A couple of days after the iPhone debut last January, six months before it shipped, a client asked me to make sure what we were making runs on iPhone. The torch is passed.
Exxon and Shell is the same like HP and Dell, your little drama is equivalent to Bob trying to get Glen to give up his Dell and buy an HP. What's the incentive?
If there were just ONE gas station that filled up your tank with clear liquid that gave you 100 miles to the gallon and zero pollution, now that would be something to tell your friends about, even recommend they give up spoiling the planet with gasoline.
First of all, every fanboy who is not the same kind of fanboy as you will seem creepy.
But more importantly, you overestimate the Apple fanboy effect. Many people buy Apple products because they're the only ones they can use because they're doctors or lawyers not CS grads. Many buy them for specific unique features such as CoreAudio for a music and audio pro, or the built-in iLife consumer media suite, or the best typography and publishing features. Many buy them because they tried one and liked it. Later they have positive opinions of the products because they work as advertised and there really isn't anything better out there for them if they need those features. HP and Dell make typewriters, that is very quaint but not appealing to an artist.
The people I watch out for are the ones who fill every computing need with a Windows PC by reflex and tell you all computers are the same. That is much worse than being a fanboy, who at least picked one thing out and said "I think that's better."
There is no hardware with 50% or more profit margin, that is ludicrous.
Attacking Apple's profit-margins is an age-old form of Microsoft FUD, anybody who does it is either disingenuous or clueless.
The way the scam works is you count the cost of Microsoft software as an expense for HP, Dell, Palm, etc. not as a profit for Microsoft. Then on the Apple side, the hardware profit (the HP/Dell/Palm part) is combined with Apple's software profit (the Microsoft part) to form a profit margin that every PC maker wishes they had but doesn't because they gave up making computers in order to be a Microsoft Hardware Partner, that is not as profitable as making computers. Software has much, much higher profit margins than hardware. If you don't even count the software profit on a non-Apple PC (the part that goes to Microsoft, the most profitable company ever in history with the largest cash hoard) then you are a disingenuous liar or a complete fool or both. You are not just hiding Microsoft's profit, you're hiding their 95% profit margin. It is very, very significant information to leave out, it is enough that you are lying by omission.
Same parts in a Mac as a PC, same parts in an iPhone as a Treo, on hardware it is a level playing field, not just by accident but because Apple wanted it that way. They could use any chip in a Mac, any chip in the iPhone, but they chose the same chip as every other PC maker, every other smart phone maker, it is level on parts and supplies and everything else. If you want to include the software profits, though, you have to bring Microsoft into the comparison.
> Anyway don't fool yourself that the iPhone is OSX. It's running on an ARM device, iPhone is as much OsX as windows smartphone is windows XP.
This is all just semantics. If you cut out some of Windows XP and call it "Windows XP Embedded" (Windows XP for embedding) or you cut out some of "Mac OS X" and call it "OS X" (OS X without the Mac) it is just a naming convention.
However I will say that iPhone looks like OS X to me, and I'm using Mac OS X every day since 2001. If Apple called it "iPhone OS" we would be saying that is just OS X ported to iPhone, not some new iPhone OS, who are you trying to fool? The Web rendering, typography, resolution-independent interface, animation, Unix flavors, compatibility with standards, even the little dock at the bottom all say "here is your OS X to go." If another company other than Apple did iPhone we would be saying iPhone is very OS X -inspired. Also, from the OS X crash logs you can clearly see that CoreFoundation and CoreAudio and other friends are there. iPhone also runs LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) to fool parts of OS X into thinking they're on a PC so that they didn't have to be rewritten.
Also notice that Mac OS X is about 2 GB and OS X is about 0.7 GB, so it is cut-down but not terribly so, because all of the devices OS X runs on (iPhone, AppleTV, next iPod) all have large storage. The Windows phone systems have storage measured in kilobytes or megabytes, not gigabytes. At the same time, OS X is much leaner than Windows, compare Safari on Windows (8 MB download) to Internet Explorer for Windows, and keep in mind Safari for Windows brings its own graphics and text rendering libraries from the Mac. So my point is that Apple's cut-down OS maintains much more of its original flavor. And from what I understand Windows and Windows CE are separate code bases, they are not the same except where they fool you into thinking they are. With OS X, where it is the same as the Mac it is because it actually still is the same. Where it is different there is a reason for it, e.g. only 8 Web pages open at once on iPhone due to limited resources, whereas on the Mac you can open 80 quite easily.
On the other hand,
> the enormous implicit value of the already developed OS. The latter is free to them
... they will make a convoluted solution out of "pure" CSS that barely works when they could have used 10 lines of JavaScript to do it exactly right. If you look at a device as one thing, or the Web browser as one thing, then you want to get at every layer of it so you can build the best stuff. Apple takes a huge quality advantage by working with the whole device.
Not really. It's not just sitting there "done" and they just install it. OS X is an ongoing development project that is funded by Apple and costs them a certain amount per year to maintain even if they never ship a new product with it all that year. Customizing it to port it to iPhone, AppleTV, and coming soon the iPod also had a significant cost. They even call it "OS X v1.0" in the iPhone although it is Leopard-related. There are new frameworks such as CoreTelephony and CoreSurface which do not exist on the Mac yet. They had to design that stuff and build it, not just buy it from someone else as a plug-in part.
(Yes, at the recent D conference Steve Jobs was running CoreSurface in his pocket when Bill Gates demoed the "innovative" Microsoft Surface retail kiosk platform.)
I don't think the leverage they have with OS X is in cost but rather in the ability to customize the entire device because they're building on so many mature and feature-rich frameworks. Whatever feature they want to add, the answer never comes back "Windows Mobile doesn't support that yet" or "you can't do that on Symbian." Also, Apple can "fine tune" the device, make software changes to work around hardware deficiencies. They can also introduce a feature in software when it makes sense or in hardware when it makes sense.
Other phone makers are like Web developers who only know HTML and CSS, no JavaScript