> Is a general purpose computing device (that happens to have a small form factor and a relatively > new physical interface) in the same category as a DVD player?
Yes. The category is “consumer electronics.”
The key feature of App Store is it made powerful native C/C++ applications into a kind of iPod content. The apps on iOS are done in the same exact way as the movies and music. All 3 of those kinds of content previously shipped on optical disc.
The discs are gone. The consumer electronics survives.
There was a point in time when we realized that all of humanity was going to need to access computing daily, and nerds thought that meant FORTRAN classes for all infants. No. It means there needs to be consumer computers, just like there were consumer music players and consumer movie players. We now have consumer “app players.” It is a great leap forward
You don't have to look for signs about how often Apple wants you to upgrade your iPad. They will tell you straight out: 2 years. You choose the storage for 2 years, you buy an AppleCare service plan for iPad (term: 2 years) and you go to work for 2 years. It is easy to pick a device with enough storage for 2 years because iOS and its apps and the documents they create are all highly optimized to fit in small storage and over bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. Compared to a typical mobile bandwidth, even a 16 GB SSD is gigantic.
As for the 2 year cycle, consumers are very, very used to paying $329 for a PC and having to replace it 2 years later with another $329 PC.
SD cards or any kind of removable media are not suitable for consumer use. You think they are because you are used to a consumer electronics market that is by and for nerds. That is no longer the case. The current consumer electronics market is iPod-based: the devices have iPod parts, they have sealed-in batteries, they have massive internal storage (for their device classes,) they have Internet, and they are connected to cloud services so that amazing things can happen with a tap from the user. Also, in iPod-style consumer electronics, there are no CD's, no DVD's, no removable media. The media is swapped in and out over the network. So you are asking for a steam engine in your electric car, it is crazy.
What you totally missed is that the iPad *is* the SD card. It's an Internet-enabled SD card. To connect the SD card to the Internet, you have to add a little computer (ARM) and Wi-Fi and a display and user interface and a browser to login to Wi-Fi networks. If you want 128 GB capacity, you buy a 128 GB iPad.
Also what you missed is I'm using multiple iPads these days, like a lot of people. The idea that each of those iPads should have an SSD slot that I'd have to populate with cards just to get enough storage to work is just crazy. Nobody wants that.
And the security implications of somebody next to you on a plane popping out your tiny microSDXC card and now they have gigabytes of your data? That is also crazy. The onboard storage on iPad is encrypted, and as long as you maintain physical possession of the iPad you also maintain physical possession of the storage.
Man, I hate to see nerds redesigning Apple gear. Just stop. Apple really did go to the trouble of designing this stuff and you have to have the humility to recognize that the users are buying the Apple gear BECAUSE IT WORKS.
The reason that we are suddenly discussing advertised SSD storage space on mobile devices over 5 years after iOS shipped is that Surface CREATED THIS PROBLEM. The iPad does not have this problem. iPad users do not notice the 1 gigabyte of their storage that is used by the operating system and built-in apps. And iPad users can install 50 apps, including video editors and very sophisticated PC class apps from the Mac, and only use up 1 or 2 gigabytes of storage.
So plugging an SD card into a Surface may be a hacky fix for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Imagining that iPad also needs an SD card because of how badly Surface is designed is way out there.
I put a gun to my head and called up Apple and told them to restructure their 3rd party accessory program to my liking. When they said no, I pulled the trigger and now I am dead. Apple killed me.
I sure hope you posted this little dissertation solely with the power of your mind and not with some kind of computing device. Because if you are using a computer then you are a fucking hypocrite with a complete lack of self-awareness.
As if your home-brew Linux shitbox is any more noble than an iPhone.
There is no rational definition under which Apple is losing anything right now. They are winning whether you look at the stock market, overall profitability, consumer loyalty, mindshare, high-end phone sales (iPhone,) high-end and low-end media player sales (iPod,) high-end PC sales (Mac,) and low-end PC sales (iPad,) or court cases.
Samsung is cleaning up in low-end phones just like HP and Dell cleaned up in low-end PC's for many years before the iPad launched. Enjoy it while it lasts, Samsung.
Further, Apple is in the best position to clean up in 4KTV because of iTunes and their integrated hardware/software. They may be the only company that can sell you a large 4K glass that just plugs into AC and that is it. You turn it on and tell it your Wi-Fi password and buy The Dark Knight in 4K.
> [Apple] are causing harm to everyone in the industry
How? By inventing the multitouch phone? By porting the World Wide Web from Intel to ARM and giving the source away to everybody else so that the iPhone browser is also used in Android and Google Chrome? By teaching consumers to PAY FOR SOFTWARE instead of just steal it? By making the very first PC platform that can be used out-of-the-box by the visually impaired? By creating the very first and still the only successful ARM PC platform so that we could get out of the Wintel monopoly? By making tens of billions of dollars for C/C++ coders with App Store? By enabling the 9 out of 10 people who can't use Mac/Windows effectively to do PC class computing with almost no training? By introducing PC class computing to the majority of workers who DON'T HAVE A DESK, dramatically expanding the range and scope of the PC market? By creating opportunities for case and accessory makers to make millions of dollars accessorizing only 1 phone model per year with just-works accessories?
I know it is hard for people brought up in the anti-competitive Wintel PC market to believe this, but computer makers are SUPPOSED TO COMPETE. They are supposed to bring out products that are so good that the entire of HP is suddenly obsolete, overnight. That is what is supposed to happen. That is a healthy market. That is not Apple taking advantage of HP. That is Apple simply COMPETING with HP. HP is supposed to be able to compete back. Samsung is supposed to be able to create their own smartphone line, not simply copy Apple's smartphone line. This is competition.
The Galaxy line of phones was built from stolen Apple iPhone specifications. Galaxy is not an independent product, it is fork of iPhone that Samsung felt they had the right to make because they were Apple's biggest component supplier. That is illegal and immoral. Pretending it is not will only cause you to be mystified as Samsung loses court case after court case.
Honestly, I invite you to rewrite your post and include a URL for every point you make that backs up your assertion with numbers and facts. Because there aren't any numbers of facts that back up your claims. You are like a Fox News viewer asserting that President Obama was born in Kenya. The only people who will agree with you are the people who are also inside your Gizmodo/Slashdot bubble. The Internet is world wide. Your bubble is not and you look like an ass.
- Apple WebKit, the reason that the World Wide Web even runs on ARM mobiles, as well as other open source projects like Clang, LLVM, CUPS - ISO MPEG-4 (which is QuickTime) - iTunes for Windows - iTunes U - iBooks Author - Genius Bar
> Apple has sort of lost its way.
Complete and utter bullshit.
> Apple's biggest asset is its elite image.
Complete and utter bullshit. Their biggest asset is that their products work. That they simply function, out-of-the-box, without assembly, without CS degree, without I-T support help.
> I recall when Apple started lowering the prices of their lower-end computers. In one Mac forum I had visited, one long-time Apple user got disgusted saying "Great! Now *anyone* can be an Apple user..."
Dude, they sell a Mac now for fucking $329 complete, with a 10 hour battery. The video editor for it is $5, and there is one from Avid as well for $5. Their office apps are the best in the world and they are $10 each. iPhoto for iOS is basically Photoshop and it costs $5. How did you fucking miss that? For less than $400, a person can outfit themselves with an iPad mini, a keyboard, and 25 great 3rd party apps and they will want for nothing. That is 45 cents per day over a 2 year lifespan, 10 hours per day on battery, and no hidden costs like anti-virus.
And how did you miss that Wintel systems costs $n to buy and another $n to maintain per year? That means your cost for 3 years of computing is 4x the sticker price. With a Mac, your cost for 3 years of computing is the sticker price. No hidden costs. No anti-virus, not security add-ons, no upgrades to the “real” version of the operating system. And Macs have hundreds of dollars of 3rd party apps built in, for making music, making movies, etc.
The really sad thing you missed is that Apple is not elitist. Apple is the choice of artists who have no fucking money because Apple is the CHEAPEST. The choice of students because Apple is the CHEAPEST. You can buy a Mac for school and you are done. No more costs. You don't have to hire I-T help to get it working. You don't have to take a course. You don't have to come up with $50 on the spot to get viruses cleaned off. For most users, a Windows PC is a lemon car that is always in the shop. If you are a mechanic, you might not notice that, you might do the work yourself. But it is elitist of you to demand that only mechanics can have cheap computing and the rest have to pay consultants through the nose.
So you are full of shit. Tired old harmful, untrue, dogmatic BULLSHIT.
The cost of computing is NOT THE HARDWARE. The cost is the software, the setup, the administration, the training, the downtime. Apple addresses all of that. They sell you the complete package up-front in an honest way, including cheap 3rd party apps and Genius Bar support. Others sell you just the hardware, then they bleed the rest out of you.
I have $400 to spend on a new PC. I'm going to get an iPad mini and a bunch of apps and games, or — what? Pitch me on the non-Apple option and how much cheaper and better it is going to be. Remember, to include apps. I'm going to want a video editor like iMovie or Avid for iOS ($5 each,) multitrack audio editor like GarageBand for iOS ($5,) an office suite like Keynote, Pages, Numbers for iOS ($30,) and let's say 5 casual games like Angry Birds and 5 console games. And I need to know there is somewhere like Genius Bar that I can go if things go wrong and they can get me back up and running. I can get all of that for $400 from Apple, and that gets me setup for at least 2 years of use with no additional costs. Where is the non-elitist option for that from one of Apple's community-oriented competitors who only make computers so as to lower their costs for the user out of the good of their hearts?
Total BS. Climb out of your bubble. Look at the people who were surprised that Romney lost and that is the same as the nerds who were surprised that Windows/Linux generic PC computing lost. The real world has totally and completely moved on from everything that Romney and generic PC's were selling. We have seen all of the scams. Nobody is buying anymore.
> With Google selling zero-margin products at unbelievable prices, all players will be forced into a zero-margin position,
History shows it will be all players except Apple that are forced down to zero margins. See PC's, see phones, see media players.
Also, Google Nexus and Amazon Kindle are basically US brands only. They are vanity plays, not real products. And neither is PC class, neither will sell to a user who has no other PC and needs PC class apps.
> What they need to do is create and (temporarily) dominate a brand new market segment, but I don't know what that could be.
Mobile Tablet PC's. iPad. Created in 2010, dominating ever since.
The reason you think that Apple is not dominating with iPad is that entrenched interests are playing games with numbers to hide this fact from you. First, they excluded iPad from being counted in PC sales, even though users were saying in 8 out of 10 cases that they bought an iPad instead of a Mac/Windows PC, and even though in many cases, they run the same apps like iMovie and Keynote and Safari on their iPad that they would have run on the Mac. Now, iPad is categorized with Kindle Fire, which is a media player like iPod, and Nexus 7, which is a big phone. The Kindle and Nexus devices only sell in the US, and they have no native C/C++ apps, which is iPads PRIMARY FEATURE. So these statistical games might keep you from recognizing that iPad outsells all of HP, but it doesn't stop consumers from buying iPads. It doesn't change the fact that Apple has the only successful tablet PC platform, the only tablet PC apps, and the only PC lines that are growing in sales, not shrinking. That is why Windows 8 is an answer to iPad, not to Mac. Average sales price of a Windows PC is $400 — iPad money.
> Some people think it will be television, but I just don't see why anyone would want to pay $1500 for a $500 TV.
Why would you think an Apple TV would be $1500? There is no rational basis for that.
Apple is CHEAPER. Not more expensive. If Apple makes a TV, they will make 1 or 2 sizes and they will sell 20 million of each and that will make each model MUCH, MUCH CHEAPER than a generic TV.
iPhone is the cheapest high-end smartphone. iPad is the cheapest low-end PC, the cheapest tablet PC. Tablet PC's are over $1000 from any other manufacturer. The Mac is by far the cheapest of the Unix workstations and cheapest high-end PC.
Further, Apple has no viruses, they have Genius Bar, they have $5 video editing apps and $10 office apps. Apple is cheaper.
The generic hardware is flipped around now, it is like a custom bespoke suit. The economics are like printing used to be. The first one that you make costs a ton of money, because you have to setup a production line for it. Apple doesn't even bother to set up a production line unless they can sell like 50 million. Everyone else sets up a production line and just hopes. They just cross their fingers that they will even make 1 million. That is why the “iPad Killers” are all $200 or more expensive than iPad. That is why Google and Amazon sell big phones as though they are cheap tablet PC's, when they are not.
> That market is commoditized and saturated and what would an Apple TV offer over its current $100 black box?
So is the low-end PC market that Apple is currently feasting on by turning it into a high-end tablet market. People are passing on a $699 HP notebook and buying a $499 iPad. That is cheaper. And they are getting more. iPads do more things. They do things that HP notebooks cannot dream of doing.
> They're not gaining fans with their current behaviour, they're losing them.
Fundamentally untrue, just like the rest of your post.
It is a basic, testable fact that Apple has more fans today than they did when they sued Samsung.
The entire iPad thing has happened since also. Which pretty much ruins your idea that Apple is somehow distracted by suing Samsung over iPhone and is not making any innovative products anymore. In the past 2 years, Apple went from 0% to 30% of the low-end PC market, and somehow shipped 4 generations of iPad already, plus a 5th iPad mini.
Dickish behavior is answering the iPhone 3 years later with a copy of the iPhone made from stolen iPhone plans. That is what Samsung did.
The worst thing about your fact-free post is it reeks of Nerd Entitlement, where you think that Apple should roll over for a belly rub because macho Samsung who can fab chip wants to copy effete designer iPhone features. Well, no. That is not how business works at all. Not how the law works either.
So you're just not operating in the real universe. You're in a bubble of Nerd Dogma like a Fox News viewer is in a bubble of Conservative Dogma. In your universe, Apple is a dick for taking Samsung to court and proving that Samsung wronged Apple. In your universe, Apple is not gaining fans, they're losing them. Well, that is not the real universe.
You should compare your post with the people who were saying Mitt Romney was going to win in a landslide, right up until election day. Your post has the same kind of denialism and excuses, and you are talking about an Invisible Apple that does not exist, which is the invention of Gizmodo and similar, same as Mitt Romney talked about an Invisible Obama that does not exist.
Sure, if Apple were really the company that Gizmodo says they are, then the only way they would sell a product would be through slick marketing. But they are not that company. And you are just lying to yourself while you play out this little Nerd Soap Opera from the tech press.
> And Jobs himself was a marketing guy, not a tech.
Jobs was a designer. That is why Apple's products are designed so well, and because they are designed so well, they are really easy to market. You just have to show the product and people buy. That is not true of Apple's competitors.
There is no denying Apple's success. They took on the Walkman with iPod, and they won. They took on the high-end Wintel PC with Intel Mac, and they won. They took on the smartphone with iPhone, and they won. They took on the low-end Wintel PC with iPad, and they are winning. In every case, they came in with a dramatically better product and they obsoleted their competition. That is how it is supposed to be done.
Your whole argument that Apple is engaged in irrational legal self-destruction is based on the idea that Apple cannot win their illegitimate case. Well, they won. Samsung really did copy the iPhone. There is paperwork. Apple's competitors, including Samsung, really did modify their iPhone and iPad clones since the court case so that they at least do not look exactly like Apple devices, which was causing consumer confusion. Google really has modified Android to make it less iOS-like in versions 3 and 4, which nobody uses. HTC has a license with Apple not to copy them. Microsoft has a license with Apple not to copy them. Samsung has become a punch line. Not just a copyist, but one that keeps detailed paperwork of their copying.
The only people who are surprised by this are people who have their noses so far up the Android mascot's butt that they don't know what is going on in the real world. There is a long historical precedent that company B cannot respond to company A's 2–3 year success with a #1 market-leading product by simply copying that product in exacting detail, including accessories and box packaging. Pepsi is literally forbidden by law from releasing a product called “Coke” in a curvy red and white bottle. The only reason for them to do that would be to confuse consumers who wanted a real Coke into buying a fake Coke. There might be some extreme Pepsi fanboys who would defend Pepsi's right to do that and say “Coke doesn't have a patent on red,” but even middle school kids are media-savvy enough today to know that is all BS. Pepsi's obligation is to make a cola that is so good, it makes Coke drinkers not want a Coke, and instead want a Pepsi. Same for Samsung. It's not OK to just throw up your hands and start selling Pepsi Coke or Samsung iPhones.
So you need to catch up your Jobs quote (the guy has been dead for a year, and that quote was a year old then) with some facts on the ground from 2012. Your theory that the legal action by Apple was the result of a “Fuehrer cult” or was “crazy” or “irrational” is obsoleted by the fact THAT APPLE WON THE CASES. Not only were they not illegitimate lawsuits, but Apple WON. When you win a lawsuit and alter the actions at all of your competitors in your favor, that means it was a legitimate, rational, sane, well-considered lawsuit.
Those people who thought Mitt Romney was going to win in a landslide? Even they gave that up once the verdict was in.
Fox is not a mainstream news source. It is news entertainment, like The Daily Show. You're watching actors in both cases.
MSNBC is editorial and makes no attempt to hide that. The news from NBC is at NBC News.
Slashdot actually says it is “news.”
None of that excuses how hacky it is to use “tantrum” 3 times in one paragraph to describe the actions of a giant corporation that is merely continuing legal actions in which it is WINNING. When you are winning in court and winning in the market, you don't take tantrums, you are the one who is causing tantrums.
So the summary is not just biased, it is stupid-biased. It is like polls that tell you Mitt Romney is going to win.
No, it has nothing to do with Android, which is not a company that you can sue, or a competitor that you can compete with. It is an open source software component like Apple WebKit. Samsung is totally and only responsible for the infringement that happens with Samsung devices. Apple really is after Samsung, the giant tech cloner, who is like a hardware Microsoft. Samsung held an iPhone up to the light and used that for a blueprint for their smartphone line. When you copy your #1 competitor's product, you save a ton of money on designers, but you waste it all on lawyers later. That is the way the world works.
Apple has already won. They already got what they wanted, which was to show the process by which a 2008 iPhone 3G became a 2010 Galaxy smartphone, including the paperwork. What that did was it cast suspicion over every hardware maker that created a phone post-iPhone that was in any way influenced by iPhone, which is all of them. Before the Samsung Galaxy, there was this common fiction that everyone in generic tech created that their products were not clones of Apple products, but rather, they were competing products, independently designed and produced, that just happened to be way too much like the Apple products of the previous 2–5 years. Now, when the whole world has been shown a months-long, company-wide paper trail of an iPhone 3G going through a set process to become a Samsung Galaxy, it is like when people finally realized that pro wrestling was not sports, but rather “sports entertainment.”
You can see that Apple won because Samsung and the rest of the generic tech industry have changed their ways. Samsung's new tablet looks like their pre-iPad tablet, even down to the flimsy construction and the stylus. Other companies are hiring designers before they make a product so that they don't have to hire lawyers later. There are generic tech manufacturers complaining that Samsung blew their whole follow-and-copy-Apple business model because now the lights are on all the time.
It doesn't matter anyway. The phone market is going away, replaced by mobile computers. Samsung is still a huge presence in phones, but not in computers. As the ARM-based devices become true PC's, that is an advantage for Apple. Android is not a PC class system. There just is not the software infrastructure there.
The Surface with keyboard is $599. And you need the keyboard because the office suite has not been fully updated for touch like the iPad office suite.
iPad starts at $399, and in less than one week, we expect a new model at $299.
There is nothing in the Surface lineup to match the screen on the iPad with Retina Display. So Microsoft is competing with the $299/$399 iPads, not the $499 iPad.
And iPad has about 500,000 apps, 250,000 of which are full-size, and over 100,000 hardware accessories. And the whole iTunes media ecosystem. Microsoft has 4000 apps for Surface RT, and their music store is relaunching again, for the 4th or 5th time this century.
And Apple has like 35 years of making consumer computers. On October 27th, Microsoft will have one (1) day of experience making consumer computers.
But wait, Surface RT has a cut-down version of the mouse-driven Microsoft Office. For $45, you can put Keynote, Pages, Numbers, iMovie, iPhoto, and GarageBand on your iPad, and that is going to enable you to produce a 2 minute marketing video for YouTube, which is a 21st century task, not just make a Word document, which is a 1985 task. And even with that $45 of software, that only makes an iPad Air into a $344 device, and iPad 2 would be $444.
So Surface has a lot of disadvantages against Apple.
And then back to the pricing, what does $599 buy you?
- $599 at Microsoft — 1 Surface RT with touch cover
- $599 at Apple — 1 iPad Air, 1 iPhone (or iPod touch,) 1 iPod shuffle, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand, and almost enough left over to get cases for everything
- $599 at Apple — 2 iPad Airs and a dollar change
- $599 at Apple — iPad with Retina Display, Wireless Keyboard, Keynote, Pages, Numbers
and Surface is only at all 5 Microsoft Stores. The Apple gear is at hundreds of Apple Stores and other stores.
In Canada, they know where the fuck India is. The people you are referring to are called “First Nations” not Indians. Maybe you should look at a map also.
I tried quite a few approaches to go from Web skills to iOS skills, and this book really got me there, because it starts basically from scratch and focuses on iPad, and it uses newer Xcode features like StoryBoard that will save you a lot of time versus learning the older techniques.
I don't really see why you would do anything other than iOS, because it is the only next-generation PC platform as yet, and it has the excitement of a young platform yet the maturity from Mac OS X that gives you all these frameworks to access to easily get a lot of functionality. So even though you are catching up, there are many iOS programmers who are also new to the platform, you can mix right in with them and share knowledge. And the platform is growing, so by the time you have caught up, there will still be work to be done.
Stack Overflow is also great when you get stuck on iOS programming. There were about 10 times I got stuck and the answer was on Stack Overflow, solved the problem right away.
Put the PC in the trash and buy him a $399 iPad and allow him to participate in digital culture.
There is NO EXCUSE for putting a non-consumer PC in front of a consumer. Windows PC's cannot be safely attached to the Internet. The US government advises citizens not to use Windows PC's for banking or store any private data on them. Further, they are obsolete and end-of-lifed. Windows is transitioning to cheaper ARM hardware over the next few years and to a new interface and the Intel version is being abandoned because people are literally not willing to pay that much for Windows anymore. ASP for a Windows PC is below the entry-level $399 iPad price, and the Intel parts have to go to get the ASP down lower and stop the Windows platform from shrinking. So you are wondering why his PC cannot deal with the modern world? Because it is a relic. Trash it.
Today, you can go to the fucking iPod Store and buy a virus-free, malware-free, scam-free, training-free, no-I-T required consumer PC for $399 and it has $5 video editors from the 2 leading vendors, $10 best-of-class office apps, $1 games, video calls, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and all kinds of apps that Microsoft is pleading for developers to port to their office PC's.
Hey Slashdot, how can I fix a cardboard door that has been kicked in by scammers? You fix it with a fucking impregnable metal door that costs the same or less than the cardboard door you bought from a vendor that took advantage if you. Stop putting in cardboard doors.
A car with a computer in it that prevents the car from hitting another car also prevents you from deliberately ramming other cars. We use our brains to make a judgement that it is worth it on balance. And no, we can't make a car that never ever crashes, but we can take legitimate steps to reduce crashes significantly, and in fact it is immoral to do any other thing.
The main thing people want from a computer is also not to crash. Not just literal crashes where the kernel panics, but also getting a virus that takes the machine down, or having data stolen, or being added to a botnet, or even just doing something that requires the user to stop their own work and put on an I-T hat and do some maintenance. We have to do everything we can to reduce those crashes, because again, it is immoral not to. If a computer wastes 30 minutes of a user's time per week, that is more than one day of their life per year your lousy computing product is stealing from that user. And 30 minutes per week is low.
Once again, Doctorow describes a Nerd Utopia where the other 90% of humanity die in car crashes and spend a day or more out of every year working around unproductive computer behavior. All to satisfy Nerd Dogma. The 90% is not interested. They did not even buy PC's — nerds did, business replaced their typewriters with them, and then sales topped out at 350 million per year, making up an installed base of about 1 billion PC's at any one time. The regular person does not want a general purpose computer that can configure. They want iPods: an easy-to-use device that has 100 specific features that never stop working, does specific tasks in a transparent manner, and yet provides the benefits of computing, and gets better via software updates.
iPad is not a general purpose computer — it only does about 1 million things. However, the regular consumer, armed with a general purpose computer can typically accomplish only a handful of things, and all of those are well within the 1 million things iPad does. That is why Nerds say iPad does less than a PC and everyone else says iPad does more.
A general purpose computer is like a workshop where you can go in and with a little work, make any tool. To some people that is Nirvana — to most, it is a grim jail cell. An iPad is a Swiss Army knife with 1 million tools inside, all ready to use. Nerds have to understand, for most people that is not just enough tools do they don't need a general purpose computer, they are also thankful that iPad has saved them from PC's. And there are plenty of True Nerds who find an iPad on the coffee table is Just Fine Thank-You. The monster workstation is still there in the Nerd Cave for your bash scripts.
To me, I don't think you have to do anything more on this issue but compare the first 5 years of Windows XP malware (seemingly infinite — at one point XP malware was the majority of Internet traffic) to the first 5 years of iOS native malware (zero.) END OF DEBATE. The iOS devices were online most of the time via various wireless networks and had no I-T managing them. They went from 16 native apps to 600,000. iOS should be awash in native malware but it has zero and that is the MINIMUM acceptable behavior for a consumer computer. An iPad has to be as reliable as paper.
And BTW — the same company that makes these blasphemous consumer computers that don't crash, also runs 4 giant developer programs (Mac, iOS, Safari, iTunes,) one of the most successful open source projects ever (WebKit,) and their instructions for how to make iTunes Extras/LP include bash commands. There is another side to the coin. They are serving the consumer computing user with iOS which does exactly what they want and serving developers and creatives with the Mac, which can do anything. To Buddhists, Mac OS and iOS are yin and yang, it is obvious. You can't make one thing for everybody. Doctorow is assuming that there will be only one kind of computer, either general purpose or not. No. Nobody is taking away your Unix. (Your Windows is
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> You can install any OS on any Windows 8 tablet.
Is that really true? Aren't they using EFI on Windows 8 tablets? They are on the phones, right?
What is the cost in I-T hours of doing that for 10,000 Surface devices?
Because we just bought 10,000 iPads and we didn't have to do any of that bullshit to get them working.
> Is a general purpose computing device (that happens to have a small form factor and a relatively
> new physical interface) in the same category as a DVD player?
Yes. The category is “consumer electronics.”
The key feature of App Store is it made powerful native C/C++ applications into a kind of iPod content. The apps on iOS are done in the same exact way as the movies and music. All 3 of those kinds of content previously shipped on optical disc.
The discs are gone. The consumer electronics survives.
There was a point in time when we realized that all of humanity was going to need to access computing daily, and nerds thought that meant FORTRAN classes for all infants. No. It means there needs to be consumer computers, just like there were consumer music players and consumer movie players. We now have consumer “app players.” It is a great leap forward
You don't have to look for signs about how often Apple wants you to upgrade your iPad. They will tell you straight out: 2 years. You choose the storage for 2 years, you buy an AppleCare service plan for iPad (term: 2 years) and you go to work for 2 years. It is easy to pick a device with enough storage for 2 years because iOS and its apps and the documents they create are all highly optimized to fit in small storage and over bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. Compared to a typical mobile bandwidth, even a 16 GB SSD is gigantic.
As for the 2 year cycle, consumers are very, very used to paying $329 for a PC and having to replace it 2 years later with another $329 PC.
SD cards or any kind of removable media are not suitable for consumer use. You think they are because you are used to a consumer electronics market that is by and for nerds. That is no longer the case. The current consumer electronics market is iPod-based: the devices have iPod parts, they have sealed-in batteries, they have massive internal storage (for their device classes,) they have Internet, and they are connected to cloud services so that amazing things can happen with a tap from the user. Also, in iPod-style consumer electronics, there are no CD's, no DVD's, no removable media. The media is swapped in and out over the network. So you are asking for a steam engine in your electric car, it is crazy.
What you totally missed is that the iPad *is* the SD card. It's an Internet-enabled SD card. To connect the SD card to the Internet, you have to add a little computer (ARM) and Wi-Fi and a display and user interface and a browser to login to Wi-Fi networks. If you want 128 GB capacity, you buy a 128 GB iPad.
Also what you missed is I'm using multiple iPads these days, like a lot of people. The idea that each of those iPads should have an SSD slot that I'd have to populate with cards just to get enough storage to work is just crazy. Nobody wants that.
And the security implications of somebody next to you on a plane popping out your tiny microSDXC card and now they have gigabytes of your data? That is also crazy. The onboard storage on iPad is encrypted, and as long as you maintain physical possession of the iPad you also maintain physical possession of the storage.
Man, I hate to see nerds redesigning Apple gear. Just stop. Apple really did go to the trouble of designing this stuff and you have to have the humility to recognize that the users are buying the Apple gear BECAUSE IT WORKS.
The reason that we are suddenly discussing advertised SSD storage space on mobile devices over 5 years after iOS shipped is that Surface CREATED THIS PROBLEM. The iPad does not have this problem. iPad users do not notice the 1 gigabyte of their storage that is used by the operating system and built-in apps. And iPad users can install 50 apps, including video editors and very sophisticated PC class apps from the Mac, and only use up 1 or 2 gigabytes of storage.
So plugging an SD card into a Surface may be a hacky fix for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Imagining that iPad also needs an SD card because of how badly Surface is designed is way out there.
The correct comparison is:
- 1 Surface Pro
- 2 iPad 4â(TM)s
- 3 iPad minis
⦠all basically $1000.
And the iPad app platform is years ahead of Windows as far as touch, installation, low price.
I put a gun to my head and called up Apple and told them to restructure their 3rd party accessory program to my liking. When they said no, I pulled the trigger and now I am dead. Apple killed me.
The Taser was still excessive, because a Taser is not required for a team of full-grown men (incompetent as they were) to arrest a single woman.
I sure hope you posted this little dissertation solely with the power of your mind and not with some kind of computing device. Because if you are using a computer then you are a fucking hypocrite with a complete lack of self-awareness.
As if your home-brew Linux shitbox is any more noble than an iPhone.
Only in a police state like the US could people be in such denial about being in a police state.
Something like 25% of the world's cops and soldiers are in the US. And 50% of the weapons. The US is the ultimate police state.
I'm trying to imagine how these cops' wives are able to sleep with them after an event like this.
You sound insane.
There is no rational definition under which Apple is losing anything right now. They are winning whether you look at the stock market, overall profitability, consumer loyalty, mindshare, high-end phone sales (iPhone,) high-end and low-end media player sales (iPod,) high-end PC sales (Mac,) and low-end PC sales (iPad,) or court cases.
Samsung is cleaning up in low-end phones just like HP and Dell cleaned up in low-end PC's for many years before the iPad launched. Enjoy it while it lasts, Samsung.
Further, Apple is in the best position to clean up in 4KTV because of iTunes and their integrated hardware/software. They may be the only company that can sell you a large 4K glass that just plugs into AC and that is it. You turn it on and tell it your Wi-Fi password and buy The Dark Knight in 4K.
> [Apple] are causing harm to everyone in the industry
How? By inventing the multitouch phone? By porting the World Wide Web from Intel to ARM and giving the source away to everybody else so that the iPhone browser is also used in Android and Google Chrome? By teaching consumers to PAY FOR SOFTWARE instead of just steal it? By making the very first PC platform that can be used out-of-the-box by the visually impaired? By creating the very first and still the only successful ARM PC platform so that we could get out of the Wintel monopoly? By making tens of billions of dollars for C/C++ coders with App Store? By enabling the 9 out of 10 people who can't use Mac/Windows effectively to do PC class computing with almost no training? By introducing PC class computing to the majority of workers who DON'T HAVE A DESK, dramatically expanding the range and scope of the PC market? By creating opportunities for case and accessory makers to make millions of dollars accessorizing only 1 phone model per year with just-works accessories?
I know it is hard for people brought up in the anti-competitive Wintel PC market to believe this, but computer makers are SUPPOSED TO COMPETE. They are supposed to bring out products that are so good that the entire of HP is suddenly obsolete, overnight. That is what is supposed to happen. That is a healthy market. That is not Apple taking advantage of HP. That is Apple simply COMPETING with HP. HP is supposed to be able to compete back. Samsung is supposed to be able to create their own smartphone line, not simply copy Apple's smartphone line. This is competition.
The Galaxy line of phones was built from stolen Apple iPhone specifications. Galaxy is not an independent product, it is fork of iPhone that Samsung felt they had the right to make because they were Apple's biggest component supplier. That is illegal and immoral. Pretending it is not will only cause you to be mystified as Samsung loses court case after court case.
Honestly, I invite you to rewrite your post and include a URL for every point you make that backs up your assertion with numbers and facts. Because there aren't any numbers of facts that back up your claims. You are like a Fox News viewer asserting that President Obama was born in Kenya. The only people who will agree with you are the people who are also inside your Gizmodo/Slashdot bubble. The Internet is world wide. Your bubble is not and you look like an ass.
it will just have sprung into being magically, ready for everyone to copy.
Apple already does a ton of stuff for free:
- Apple WebKit, the reason that the World Wide Web even runs on ARM mobiles, as well as other open source projects like Clang, LLVM, CUPS
- ISO MPEG-4 (which is QuickTime)
- iTunes for Windows
- iTunes U
- iBooks Author
- Genius Bar
> Apple has sort of lost its way.
Complete and utter bullshit.
> Apple's biggest asset is its elite image.
Complete and utter bullshit. Their biggest asset is that their products work. That they simply function, out-of-the-box, without assembly, without CS degree, without I-T support help.
> I recall when Apple started lowering the prices of their lower-end computers. In one Mac forum I had visited, one long-time Apple user got disgusted saying "Great! Now *anyone* can be an Apple user..."
Dude, they sell a Mac now for fucking $329 complete, with a 10 hour battery. The video editor for it is $5, and there is one from Avid as well for $5. Their office apps are the best in the world and they are $10 each. iPhoto for iOS is basically Photoshop and it costs $5. How did you fucking miss that? For less than $400, a person can outfit themselves with an iPad mini, a keyboard, and 25 great 3rd party apps and they will want for nothing. That is 45 cents per day over a 2 year lifespan, 10 hours per day on battery, and no hidden costs like anti-virus.
And how did you miss that Wintel systems costs $n to buy and another $n to maintain per year? That means your cost for 3 years of computing is 4x the sticker price. With a Mac, your cost for 3 years of computing is the sticker price. No hidden costs. No anti-virus, not security add-ons, no upgrades to the “real” version of the operating system. And Macs have hundreds of dollars of 3rd party apps built in, for making music, making movies, etc.
The really sad thing you missed is that Apple is not elitist. Apple is the choice of artists who have no fucking money because Apple is the CHEAPEST. The choice of students because Apple is the CHEAPEST. You can buy a Mac for school and you are done. No more costs. You don't have to hire I-T help to get it working. You don't have to take a course. You don't have to come up with $50 on the spot to get viruses cleaned off. For most users, a Windows PC is a lemon car that is always in the shop. If you are a mechanic, you might not notice that, you might do the work yourself. But it is elitist of you to demand that only mechanics can have cheap computing and the rest have to pay consultants through the nose.
So you are full of shit. Tired old harmful, untrue, dogmatic BULLSHIT.
The cost of computing is NOT THE HARDWARE. The cost is the software, the setup, the administration, the training, the downtime. Apple addresses all of that. They sell you the complete package up-front in an honest way, including cheap 3rd party apps and Genius Bar support. Others sell you just the hardware, then they bleed the rest out of you.
I have $400 to spend on a new PC. I'm going to get an iPad mini and a bunch of apps and games, or — what? Pitch me on the non-Apple option and how much cheaper and better it is going to be. Remember, to include apps. I'm going to want a video editor like iMovie or Avid for iOS ($5 each,) multitrack audio editor like GarageBand for iOS ($5,) an office suite like Keynote, Pages, Numbers for iOS ($30,) and let's say 5 casual games like Angry Birds and 5 console games. And I need to know there is somewhere like Genius Bar that I can go if things go wrong and they can get me back up and running. I can get all of that for $400 from Apple, and that gets me setup for at least 2 years of use with no additional costs. Where is the non-elitist option for that from one of Apple's community-oriented competitors who only make computers so as to lower their costs for the user out of the good of their hearts?
Total BS. Climb out of your bubble. Look at the people who were surprised that Romney lost and that is the same as the nerds who were surprised that Windows/Linux generic PC computing lost. The real world has totally and completely moved on from everything that Romney and generic PC's were selling. We have seen all of the scams. Nobody is buying anymore.
> With Google selling zero-margin products at unbelievable prices, all players will be forced into a zero-margin position,
History shows it will be all players except Apple that are forced down to zero margins. See PC's, see phones, see media players.
Also, Google Nexus and Amazon Kindle are basically US brands only. They are vanity plays, not real products. And neither is PC class, neither will sell to a user who has no other PC and needs PC class apps.
> What they need to do is create and (temporarily) dominate a brand new market segment, but I don't know what that could be.
Mobile Tablet PC's. iPad. Created in 2010, dominating ever since.
The reason you think that Apple is not dominating with iPad is that entrenched interests are playing games with numbers to hide this fact from you. First, they excluded iPad from being counted in PC sales, even though users were saying in 8 out of 10 cases that they bought an iPad instead of a Mac/Windows PC, and even though in many cases, they run the same apps like iMovie and Keynote and Safari on their iPad that they would have run on the Mac. Now, iPad is categorized with Kindle Fire, which is a media player like iPod, and Nexus 7, which is a big phone. The Kindle and Nexus devices only sell in the US, and they have no native C/C++ apps, which is iPads PRIMARY FEATURE. So these statistical games might keep you from recognizing that iPad outsells all of HP, but it doesn't stop consumers from buying iPads. It doesn't change the fact that Apple has the only successful tablet PC platform, the only tablet PC apps, and the only PC lines that are growing in sales, not shrinking. That is why Windows 8 is an answer to iPad, not to Mac. Average sales price of a Windows PC is $400 — iPad money.
> Some people think it will be television, but I just don't see why anyone would want to pay $1500 for a $500 TV.
Why would you think an Apple TV would be $1500? There is no rational basis for that.
Apple is CHEAPER. Not more expensive. If Apple makes a TV, they will make 1 or 2 sizes and they will sell 20 million of each and that will make each model MUCH, MUCH CHEAPER than a generic TV.
iPhone is the cheapest high-end smartphone. iPad is the cheapest low-end PC, the cheapest tablet PC. Tablet PC's are over $1000 from any other manufacturer. The Mac is by far the cheapest of the Unix workstations and cheapest high-end PC.
Further, Apple has no viruses, they have Genius Bar, they have $5 video editing apps and $10 office apps. Apple is cheaper.
The generic hardware is flipped around now, it is like a custom bespoke suit. The economics are like printing used to be. The first one that you make costs a ton of money, because you have to setup a production line for it. Apple doesn't even bother to set up a production line unless they can sell like 50 million. Everyone else sets up a production line and just hopes. They just cross their fingers that they will even make 1 million. That is why the “iPad Killers” are all $200 or more expensive than iPad. That is why Google and Amazon sell big phones as though they are cheap tablet PC's, when they are not.
> That market is commoditized and saturated and what would an Apple TV offer over its current $100 black box?
So is the low-end PC market that Apple is currently feasting on by turning it into a high-end tablet market. People are passing on a $699 HP notebook and buying a $499 iPad. That is cheaper. And they are getting more. iPads do more things. They do things that HP notebooks cannot dream of doing.
> They're not gaining fans with their current behaviour, they're losing them.
Fundamentally untrue, just like the rest of your post.
It is a basic, testable fact that Apple has more fans today than they did when they sued Samsung.
The entire iPad thing has happened since also. Which pretty much ruins your idea that Apple is somehow distracted by suing Samsung over iPhone and is not making any innovative products anymore. In the past 2 years, Apple went from 0% to 30% of the low-end PC market, and somehow shipped 4 generations of iPad already, plus a 5th iPad mini.
Dickish behavior is answering the iPhone 3 years later with a copy of the iPhone made from stolen iPhone plans. That is what Samsung did.
The worst thing about your fact-free post is it reeks of Nerd Entitlement, where you think that Apple should roll over for a belly rub because macho Samsung who can fab chip wants to copy effete designer iPhone features. Well, no. That is not how business works at all. Not how the law works either.
So you're just not operating in the real universe. You're in a bubble of Nerd Dogma like a Fox News viewer is in a bubble of Conservative Dogma. In your universe, Apple is a dick for taking Samsung to court and proving that Samsung wronged Apple. In your universe, Apple is not gaining fans, they're losing them. Well, that is not the real universe.
You should compare your post with the people who were saying Mitt Romney was going to win in a landslide, right up until election day. Your post has the same kind of denialism and excuses, and you are talking about an Invisible Apple that does not exist, which is the invention of Gizmodo and similar, same as Mitt Romney talked about an Invisible Obama that does not exist.
Sure, if Apple were really the company that Gizmodo says they are, then the only way they would sell a product would be through slick marketing. But they are not that company. And you are just lying to yourself while you play out this little Nerd Soap Opera from the tech press.
> And Jobs himself was a marketing guy, not a tech.
Jobs was a designer. That is why Apple's products are designed so well, and because they are designed so well, they are really easy to market. You just have to show the product and people buy. That is not true of Apple's competitors.
There is no denying Apple's success. They took on the Walkman with iPod, and they won. They took on the high-end Wintel PC with Intel Mac, and they won. They took on the smartphone with iPhone, and they won. They took on the low-end Wintel PC with iPad, and they are winning. In every case, they came in with a dramatically better product and they obsoleted their competition. That is how it is supposed to be done.
Except that Apple is winning.
Your whole argument that Apple is engaged in irrational legal self-destruction is based on the idea that Apple cannot win their illegitimate case. Well, they won. Samsung really did copy the iPhone. There is paperwork. Apple's competitors, including Samsung, really did modify their iPhone and iPad clones since the court case so that they at least do not look exactly like Apple devices, which was causing consumer confusion. Google really has modified Android to make it less iOS-like in versions 3 and 4, which nobody uses. HTC has a license with Apple not to copy them. Microsoft has a license with Apple not to copy them. Samsung has become a punch line. Not just a copyist, but one that keeps detailed paperwork of their copying.
The only people who are surprised by this are people who have their noses so far up the Android mascot's butt that they don't know what is going on in the real world. There is a long historical precedent that company B cannot respond to company A's 2–3 year success with a #1 market-leading product by simply copying that product in exacting detail, including accessories and box packaging. Pepsi is literally forbidden by law from releasing a product called “Coke” in a curvy red and white bottle. The only reason for them to do that would be to confuse consumers who wanted a real Coke into buying a fake Coke. There might be some extreme Pepsi fanboys who would defend Pepsi's right to do that and say “Coke doesn't have a patent on red,” but even middle school kids are media-savvy enough today to know that is all BS. Pepsi's obligation is to make a cola that is so good, it makes Coke drinkers not want a Coke, and instead want a Pepsi. Same for Samsung. It's not OK to just throw up your hands and start selling Pepsi Coke or Samsung iPhones.
So you need to catch up your Jobs quote (the guy has been dead for a year, and that quote was a year old then) with some facts on the ground from 2012. Your theory that the legal action by Apple was the result of a “Fuehrer cult” or was “crazy” or “irrational” is obsoleted by the fact THAT APPLE WON THE CASES. Not only were they not illegitimate lawsuits, but Apple WON. When you win a lawsuit and alter the actions at all of your competitors in your favor, that means it was a legitimate, rational, sane, well-considered lawsuit.
Those people who thought Mitt Romney was going to win in a landslide? Even they gave that up once the verdict was in.
Fox is not a mainstream news source. It is news entertainment, like The Daily Show. You're watching actors in both cases.
MSNBC is editorial and makes no attempt to hide that. The news from NBC is at NBC News.
Slashdot actually says it is “news.”
None of that excuses how hacky it is to use “tantrum” 3 times in one paragraph to describe the actions of a giant corporation that is merely continuing legal actions in which it is WINNING. When you are winning in court and winning in the market, you don't take tantrums, you are the one who is causing tantrums.
So the summary is not just biased, it is stupid-biased. It is like polls that tell you Mitt Romney is going to win.
No, it has nothing to do with Android, which is not a company that you can sue, or a competitor that you can compete with. It is an open source software component like Apple WebKit. Samsung is totally and only responsible for the infringement that happens with Samsung devices. Apple really is after Samsung, the giant tech cloner, who is like a hardware Microsoft. Samsung held an iPhone up to the light and used that for a blueprint for their smartphone line. When you copy your #1 competitor's product, you save a ton of money on designers, but you waste it all on lawyers later. That is the way the world works.
Apple has already won. They already got what they wanted, which was to show the process by which a 2008 iPhone 3G became a 2010 Galaxy smartphone, including the paperwork. What that did was it cast suspicion over every hardware maker that created a phone post-iPhone that was in any way influenced by iPhone, which is all of them. Before the Samsung Galaxy, there was this common fiction that everyone in generic tech created that their products were not clones of Apple products, but rather, they were competing products, independently designed and produced, that just happened to be way too much like the Apple products of the previous 2–5 years. Now, when the whole world has been shown a months-long, company-wide paper trail of an iPhone 3G going through a set process to become a Samsung Galaxy, it is like when people finally realized that pro wrestling was not sports, but rather “sports entertainment.”
You can see that Apple won because Samsung and the rest of the generic tech industry have changed their ways. Samsung's new tablet looks like their pre-iPad tablet, even down to the flimsy construction and the stylus. Other companies are hiring designers before they make a product so that they don't have to hire lawyers later. There are generic tech manufacturers complaining that Samsung blew their whole follow-and-copy-Apple business model because now the lights are on all the time.
It doesn't matter anyway. The phone market is going away, replaced by mobile computers. Samsung is still a huge presence in phones, but not in computers. As the ARM-based devices become true PC's, that is an advantage for Apple. Android is not a PC class system. There just is not the software infrastructure there.
Because Samsung refused a license. The Samsung CEO is on record saying that they won't license like HTC.
The Surface with keyboard is $599. And you need the keyboard because the office suite has not been fully updated for touch like the iPad office suite.
iPad starts at $399, and in less than one week, we expect a new model at $299.
There is nothing in the Surface lineup to match the screen on the iPad with Retina Display. So Microsoft is competing with the $299/$399 iPads, not the $499 iPad.
And iPad has about 500,000 apps, 250,000 of which are full-size, and over 100,000 hardware accessories. And the whole iTunes media ecosystem. Microsoft has 4000 apps for Surface RT, and their music store is relaunching again, for the 4th or 5th time this century.
And Apple has like 35 years of making consumer computers. On October 27th, Microsoft will have one (1) day of experience making consumer computers.
But wait, Surface RT has a cut-down version of the mouse-driven Microsoft Office. For $45, you can put Keynote, Pages, Numbers, iMovie, iPhoto, and GarageBand on your iPad, and that is going to enable you to produce a 2 minute marketing video for YouTube, which is a 21st century task, not just make a Word document, which is a 1985 task. And even with that $45 of software, that only makes an iPad Air into a $344 device, and iPad 2 would be $444.
So Surface has a lot of disadvantages against Apple.
And then back to the pricing, what does $599 buy you?
- $599 at Microsoft — 1 Surface RT with touch cover
- $599 at Apple — 1 iPad Air, 1 iPhone (or iPod touch,) 1 iPod shuffle, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand, and almost enough left over to get cases for everything
- $599 at Apple — 2 iPad Airs and a dollar change
- $599 at Apple — iPad with Retina Display, Wireless Keyboard, Keynote, Pages, Numbers
and Surface is only at all 5 Microsoft Stores. The Apple gear is at hundreds of Apple Stores and other stores.
> Amerindians
In Canada, they know where the fuck India is. The people you are referring to are called “First Nations” not Indians. Maybe you should look at a map also.
I tried quite a few approaches to go from Web skills to iOS skills, and this book really got me there, because it starts basically from scratch and focuses on iPad, and it uses newer Xcode features like StoryBoard that will save you a lot of time versus learning the older techniques.
Learning iPad Programming
The book is available in iBookstore.
I don't really see why you would do anything other than iOS, because it is the only next-generation PC platform as yet, and it has the excitement of a young platform yet the maturity from Mac OS X that gives you all these frameworks to access to easily get a lot of functionality. So even though you are catching up, there are many iOS programmers who are also new to the platform, you can mix right in with them and share knowledge. And the platform is growing, so by the time you have caught up, there will still be work to be done.
Stack Overflow is also great when you get stuck on iOS programming. There were about 10 times I got stuck and the answer was on Stack Overflow, solved the problem right away.
Put the PC in the trash and buy him a $399 iPad and allow him to participate in digital culture.
There is NO EXCUSE for putting a non-consumer PC in front of a consumer. Windows PC's cannot be safely attached to the Internet. The US government advises citizens not to use Windows PC's for banking or store any private data on them. Further, they are obsolete and end-of-lifed. Windows is transitioning to cheaper ARM hardware over the next few years and to a new interface and the Intel version is being abandoned because people are literally not willing to pay that much for Windows anymore. ASP for a Windows PC is below the entry-level $399 iPad price, and the Intel parts have to go to get the ASP down lower and stop the Windows platform from shrinking. So you are wondering why his PC cannot deal with the modern world? Because it is a relic. Trash it.
Today, you can go to the fucking iPod Store and buy a virus-free, malware-free, scam-free, training-free, no-I-T required consumer PC for $399 and it has $5 video editors from the 2 leading vendors, $10 best-of-class office apps, $1 games, video calls, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and all kinds of apps that Microsoft is pleading for developers to port to their office PC's.
Hey Slashdot, how can I fix a cardboard door that has been kicked in by scammers? You fix it with a fucking impregnable metal door that costs the same or less than the cardboard door you bought from a vendor that took advantage if you. Stop putting in cardboard doors.
A car with a computer in it that prevents the car from hitting another car also prevents you from deliberately ramming other cars. We use our brains to make a judgement that it is worth it on balance. And no, we can't make a car that never ever crashes, but we can take legitimate steps to reduce crashes significantly, and in fact it is immoral to do any other thing.
The main thing people want from a computer is also not to crash. Not just literal crashes where the kernel panics, but also getting a virus that takes the machine down, or having data stolen, or being added to a botnet, or even just doing something that requires the user to stop their own work and put on an I-T hat and do some maintenance. We have to do everything we can to reduce those crashes, because again, it is immoral not to. If a computer wastes 30 minutes of a user's time per week, that is more than one day of their life per year your lousy computing product is stealing from that user. And 30 minutes per week is low.
Once again, Doctorow describes a Nerd Utopia where the other 90% of humanity die in car crashes and spend a day or more out of every year working around unproductive computer behavior. All to satisfy Nerd Dogma. The 90% is not interested. They did not even buy PC's — nerds did, business replaced their typewriters with them, and then sales topped out at 350 million per year, making up an installed base of about 1 billion PC's at any one time. The regular person does not want a general purpose computer that can configure. They want iPods: an easy-to-use device that has 100 specific features that never stop working, does specific tasks in a transparent manner, and yet provides the benefits of computing, and gets better via software updates.
iPad is not a general purpose computer — it only does about 1 million things. However, the regular consumer, armed with a general purpose computer can typically accomplish only a handful of things, and all of those are well within the 1 million things iPad does. That is why Nerds say iPad does less than a PC and everyone else says iPad does more.
A general purpose computer is like a workshop where you can go in and with a little work, make any tool. To some people that is Nirvana — to most, it is a grim jail cell. An iPad is a Swiss Army knife with 1 million tools inside, all ready to use. Nerds have to understand, for most people that is not just enough tools do they don't need a general purpose computer, they are also thankful that iPad has saved them from PC's. And there are plenty of True Nerds who find an iPad on the coffee table is Just Fine Thank-You. The monster workstation is still there in the Nerd Cave for your bash scripts.
To me, I don't think you have to do anything more on this issue but compare the first 5 years of Windows XP malware (seemingly infinite — at one point XP malware was the majority of Internet traffic) to the first 5 years of iOS native malware (zero.) END OF DEBATE. The iOS devices were online most of the time via various wireless networks and had no I-T managing them. They went from 16 native apps to 600,000. iOS should be awash in native malware but it has zero and that is the MINIMUM acceptable behavior for a consumer computer. An iPad has to be as reliable as paper.
And BTW — the same company that makes these blasphemous consumer computers that don't crash, also runs 4 giant developer programs (Mac, iOS, Safari, iTunes,) one of the most successful open source projects ever (WebKit,) and their instructions for how to make iTunes Extras/LP include bash commands. There is another side to the coin. They are serving the consumer computing user with iOS which does exactly what they want and serving developers and creatives with the Mac, which can do anything. To Buddhists, Mac OS and iOS are yin and yang, it is obvious. You can't make one thing for everybody. Doctorow is assuming that there will be only one kind of computer, either general purpose or not. No. Nobody is taking away your Unix. (Your Windows is