But history has played this over and over again, and Woz always wins. Vendors work out standards; the user experience consolidates.
If you give people the freedom and trust them, they'll work it out. Or you can trust a benevolent dictator to work it out for you. Most Apple afficianados will say the most people don't want that freedom; I'm here to tell you that they do.
We don't have to debate. Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month, after the faithful have all bought theirs. Woz will win. Woz always wins.
We already watched the sales of the iPhone, and we saw how that went. Same type of device, same type of complaints by openness advocate, and what was the result? Are you guys going to just keep on saying this stuff until some closed Apple product fails, then say that's proof that people want openness, ignoring the litany of preceding closed devices that succeeded? I'm here to tell you that this is not a very good argument.
Of course I'm not going to declare the iPhone a failure - it's clearly done very well. But I think it's still a little early to call it a winner.
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the_truth_about_apple...
I think Apple is largely less capable then MS of holding a problematic monopoly for long (at least with their current m.o.). That would require being every thing for every person to plug all potential competition holes. That comes with hairy compromises that Apple probably won't want to make.
So far, Apple hasn't done any net damage. They are getting things done and moving things along fast. It will take either a real slow down in their innovation or some serious damage to flip that balance.
The very first personal computers, like the Apple II, were sold as development kits to developers/hobbyists because these were the only people who would even think to buy a personal computer in 1976 and 1977. These development kits contain all of the information one would need to create software and hardware for these machines. Is that so unusual?
Fast forward one short year to 1978 and Apple hires Jef Raskin to start the "McIntosh" project. His goal is to create a $500 computing appliance that the average person could own and use. Sound familiar?
Fast forward 32 years. There is more information published about the internals of Linux, Windows, OS X, and PC architecture than most developers would ever want to know. We can write low-level drivers that run in the kernel, to high-level scripting languages. We can design a custom hardware card to slap in a PC or MacPro; we can design custom hardware that connects to an iPhone or a laptop via USB. And the iPad is arguably the closest we've come to Jef Raskin's 1978 vision of a computing appliance.
Although I was very young, and it was a log time ago, I'm not sure I agree with you. My dad purchased an S-100 bus system from George Morrow's Thinker Toys in 1977. It came with CP/M, there were games, including Star Trek and Adventure, there was even a word processor of some kind (not WordStar, something else). It certainly wasn't used as a "development kit" -- outside of maybe knowing a little BASIC, my dad didn't know how to program and used the computer for writing letters, and for playing games (which drove my mother nuts :))
Indeed, it it the overwhelming triumph of openness in many spheres -- the cheap standard components, open-source operating systems, open protocols -- which means other 'sealed appliance' strategies need to be tried, to explore those areas not ideally served by total openness.
The sealed iPhone/iPod isn't a rival to openness, but a necessary complement and outgrowth. Just look at the Settings > General > About > Legal page. You'll see 20+ pages of mostly open-source license/copyright declarations.
Wikipedia agrees. The circuit board was complete, but the purchaser needed to "build the case".
However, to make a working computer, users still had to add a case, power supply transformers, power switch, ASCII keyboard, and composite video display
You don't get schematics with anything today because you throw it out if it breaks rather than pay someone $100/hr (what auto mechanics charge) to fix it for you.
Intellectual property is also a bigger concern today that it was back then. By not giving you the schematics, they force you to do the tedious (but easy) task of reverse engineering their product.
I suspect the resurrection of this vision is what will begin the fightback against Apple's closed universe vision. If I could get the same (or better) hardware, with roughly the same formfactor as the IPad with a lot of connectors and a completely hackable software stack for a decent price, that would be awesome. The only competition shaping up on the hardware front seems to be HP's slate. Maybe I should buy one and install Linux (or something else) on it when it comes out.
(If I am wrong correct me, what is a good tablet that competes with the IPad?) I would love to see something built around an ARM processor for e.g. but building hardware is a lot tougher than in Woz's days. As a thought experiment if just the hardware part of the IPod were available for say 350 $ or so it wasn't closed and were completely open like the original Apple so we could hack whatever on it, how many of us would buy one? I would. If i had the harware chops i'd build and sell this myself.
Linux is awesome but there isn't a competing (with the IPad) hardware platform to run it on. Hopefully some one will have the cojones and talent to go up against Apple soon. Remember, once Microsoft was the unstoppable juggernaut who were on track to dominate all of computing.
I hope to live to see the day of the withering of Apple.
Plus the disassembly instructions are provided by the manufacturer: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Top_part
indeed, the days you could buy four microswitches and some wood and have a joystick that worked as well as one from the shops are long gone, yet people still compare the iPad to a >30 year old computer which came with schematic diagrams.
What would most computer hobbyists do with an iPad schematics? Why would you buy an open ipad chassis? Did you buy an OpenMoko phone?
Or what about an app that exposed the iPhone OS APIs through RPC to programs running on an Arduino board with Bluetooth? This kit might make for a nice product!
Actually the beauty of this approach, is that a 3rd party could come out with this quickly, using App Engine or Amazon as a back end. Combine that with an iPad App that opens a special purpose browser/Ide to run them in, and I think you'd have a business.
Yeah, it's exciting that Quake2 runs in Chrome/Safari, it really is. But in 95/96 I was participating in demo-scenes, with graphics that weren't accelerated by the GPU, in 386 real-mode, and it was a lot easier and a lot more exciting (demos that got distributed by a local PC magazine, having as target more people than the people that actually tried that HTML5 Quake2 demo).
So welcome to 1997.
To play on a level field with native apps? No. Wrong discussion! What about for the same sort of tinkerer/hobbyist who wrote Hypercard stacks? Seems to me, with a little hosting and a few tools, Javascript would be dandy!
(And as for commercial apps on Hypercard -- hey, you're free to try. But I'm not talking about targeting those folks.)
I will say, on Monday that Adobe is releasing flash CS5 which will build native Android/iPhone/iPad/Desktop/Web apps all from the same source (which will be compiled down, not interpreted). I for one would love for this to be the new hypercard :OD
They're just fine with you using their extremely performant javascript implementation.
"You'd go to the store and they'd just have all this stuff that you could buy to enhance the Apple II. So one of our big keys to success was that we were very open. There's a big world out there for other people to come and join us."
What exactly is lacking from modern hardware today? Not enough communications capability? Screen isn't large or hi-res enough?
The expandability has moved to software. That's the App Store. People are customizing their machines and adding capability, but they're doing it through the SDK and not the schematics.
The parts would have added another $5 to the total cost, if that. It also gives them a reason to sell you a new one a year or two down the line. Along with less anemic ram, needed for this amazing new feature called multi-tasking.
Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone? And lets not forget that we make stuff for normal people here. Not just hackers like us. As it turns out, most folks don't want a hardware-hackable machine. They don't care enough for USB ports. The tablets being championed by MSFT in the previous decade were not much more moddable than the iPad, but I don't see anyone yelling at MSFT about that.
I must have forgotten that because it isn't true. On my P800 or Blackberry I could install any app, not just approved ones.
(Edit: I wonder if this meme about the "cell phone dark ages" comes from the millions of people who switched from dumbphones to iPhone and thus aren't personally familiar with the actual smartphone state of the art circa 2006.)
The device makers simply didn't have enough leverage to make the process simple.
It's not as if this is a recent idea Apple's had. If anything, OSX's relative openness was the aberration, given their history. Despite how exciting we find the Apple II era, I tend to think of the Mac as a bigger part of their history, certainly in terms of the Mac era's influence on today's company.
No Macs ever prevented you from running and distributing whatever software you wanted. And while there wasn't a command line before OS X, there were a great deal of opportunities for hacking via extensions, ResEdit, HyperCard, etc.
"illegal"?! I am not aware it would be illegal to run such a service at that time.
> the Macintosh was a radical innovation in its own right, being the first mass-produced computer to feature a "mouse" and a "desktop
Lisa? Star? Although that last one was not "mass-produced", at least it came out of a factory.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz.html
http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/07.html
I'm guessing that when the article describes the dial-a-joke service as illegal, it's confusing it with his blue-box antics, which occurred around the same time. According to the following article (a fun read), the blue box preceded dial-a-joke; he got the inspiration for the service from a dial-a-joke line in New York that he called while demoing blue boxes to potential customers:
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_mi...
and a few other good accounts of the period, it really annoys me that Apple get the credit for inventing the personal computer. They were not even the most popular personal computer of the 80s (or 70s). I have a hard time finding anyone who own a Apple II but most of the people I work with were Commodore 64 owners.
I don't understand.. how?
At best, I see it appealing to a small niche gaming market, but as it stands, I can't see how it would overrun Sony or Microsoft - for example, the iPad is hugely underpowered compared to todays popular gaming machines and you would definitely need to couple it with some other input devices, like keyboard & mouse or gamepads, since multitouch alone doesn't seem all that suitable for a lot of games IMHO.
For example, Brickbreaker has been played by over 50 million people while COD: Modern Warfare 2 has only been played by 15 million.
These type of games (that hardcore gamers would consider silly and frivolous) are going to be the dominant games in the marketplace.
If I could choose between the two of them as human beings I'd pick Wozniak for sure, he's one of the nicest 'well to do' people that ever came out of silicon valley.
Jobs is simply still in a pissing match with Gates, and it looks like he will be able to prove some day that Apples view of the software market was even more closed than Microsofts, and potentially far more profitable.
I bought a Mac for my son a couple of years ago, I'm beginning to regret that decision. At the time it was to open his eyes to the fact that not every computer on the planet runs the same operating system and that diversity is good. Now I'm not so sure that an Apple was the right way to express that (he already had an older linux computer to play with blender on, but it was definitely past its prime).
Money is a very convenient yardstick to measure success by, but it collapses a lot of data in to a single number and it does not tell you the history of how it got there.
Clearly 'open' is never going to make as much money as 'closed', the RIAA and MPAA are all too aware of that, but longer term 'open' will always win because stuff that is special today is a commodity tomorrow.
Remember the times when each and every piece of electronics came with it's own weird set of proprietary protocols and connectors? Now it's all IP and we're better off because of that, except for the lawyers.
Apple had no control over the software and hardware used with the original Macintosh. The author is just flat wrong on this. The serial connectors were a bit weird for the time, but that was it. There was none of the patented-connector, crypto-signed-applications, brick-the-hacked-devices tactics we see with the i* line. The Mac OS didn't even have kernel mode. You could just rewrite all of RAM with your own code and jump to address zero if you felt like it, and people did.
The Apple //c was as "closed" as the Macintosh, and I'm pretty sure Woz had something to do with that machine (you could even get a signed limited edition).
Modern Macs are made with plenty of standard parts, and the worst that happens if you mess with them is that you void the warranty--which is exactly what happens if you mess with the insides of a Dell or HP computer.
The true divergence is that Jobs now has Apple producing consumer entertainment devices in addition to computers. Obviously, the tradeoffs and rules are different for consumer entertainment devices. Whether it's an iPhone, a PS3, or the radio in my car, the manufacturer isn't interested in supporting openness and arbitrary hacking--they are expected to make a functional, attractive product that "just works", which requires maintaining some control over what goes into it.
P.S. AT&T Wireless is the result of AT&T absorbing McCaw Cellular, and separated again from AT&T years ago, so while it's fun to talk about the irony of Jobs' blue-boxing, that wasn't really quite the same company.
From the moment they were selling real products and not kits, Apple has always wanted to control every aspect of the computing experience. For a while, at Apple, it was considered heresy to be an "Open Mac" supporter -- that is, you thought it was okay to allow third party companies to produce peripherals like disk drives or printers. It was only around '87 or so that the idea of an expandable Mac saw the light of day (the Macintosh II) and that product line slowly petered out in the 90s.
People on this thread are suggesting that the OS was hackable with a floppy disk out of some desire to be friendly to tinkerers. Don't be silly. It was that way because there was no other conceivable alternative for software distribution.
If we disregard Apple's mid-90s confusions it's been on a steady road towards the iPad since the beginning, in rhetoric if not always in reality.
the iPad is just one more of those things and the Woz stood in line eagerly to get his.
