I terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak.
Of course Apple has provided a lot of value to users and the world but much more limited than if everything was hackable and repairable.
I guess my point is that I suspect, if you could add up the additional value of an 'open Apple' for every individual, you would end up with a considerably larger amount than the current market cap of Apple.
Let's do some math. Apple market cap is $2.4T right now. Let's say a third of the world could use their products in some form, that's $2,4T divided by 2.7B people or $900 per potential user.
If I could extend the life of my iPhone by 4 years with repairs I've already recouped "my share". And that's without mentioning any other product or the added value of being able to customize and repurpose old stuff.
Of course some of Apple's achievments wouldn't have been possible without their business model, but I think there should be a pressure on companies to open source technology after a certain period of time. It would be to the benefit of society.
And this isn't just Apple, most brands are going the same route. Meanwhile world its sinking in garbage, but shareholders are happy I guess.
In theory yes, but it also could have tanked Apple resulting in Jobs/Woz going elsewhere and Apple never becoming what it's become, never pushing Mobile, Music, thinner / better quality laptops, etc.
I think in the ideal world we would have a balance between Job's vision and Woz's vision. Having that highly profitable company but the hackable open world.
(if that makes sense)
As a personality, I like Wozniak more. If I ever had a chance to meet Jobs and Wozniak in person, I suspect that I would find Wozniak to be a much better person than Jobs. That being said, I think that Jobs provided much more value to the world.
Wozniak's chief contribution to the world is the Apple II. It is a wonderful computer with fun stories behind its development, but the computer industry would have gone on without it. Apple's early years are culturally significant since it was one of the few success stories that wasn't corporate (in contrast to the Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80), but that story is probably the most significant part about the company.
Contrast that to Jobs. As a minimum, the Apple II and Macintosh can be contributed to him. Without his drive, the Apple II would likely be remembered as one of the multitude of personal computers that didn't make it in the marketplace. Without his drive, the GUI as a consumer product would have been set back years and would probably have looked very different. As expensive as the original Macintosh was, it was far less expensive than many of its contemporaries. As crude as the original Macintosh user interface was, it did provide a model for later products. Perhaps his antagonistic attitude towards user serviceability takes away from that, but it isn't all that different from how appliances were treated in the mid-1980's.
Edit: expanded a couple of sentences for clarity.
Wozniak would have gotten them nowhere, especially in no position to create products worth opening up.
Third of California, maybe. The world? I don't think so.
It's better to be more fine grained here. Apple's highest profits wouldn't be possible without creating walled gardens. It's entirely possible, though, that their gains would diminish very little if they hadn't made the decision to glue everything and make their after-2012 computing devices non-upgradeable.
I'd be very happy if phones and other devices didn't include already ubiquitous extra stuff. It creates more extra waste than the extra packaging for something you buy only once, anyway. It's different if you buy a printer because you need it to be plugged in and replugging cables behind the desk would be a hassle, but phones only use the cable for charging (sometimes data) and don't need it to be usable. So if you have a cable and a charger that will work for any other phone just as well, just not at the same time if you have multiple.
If you have incompatible plugs there are adapters, too. At least for micro USB to USB-C, which I use instead of buying more new cables. Dunno if you can do that with the connector iPhones use. If not, fuck them, but Apple is right that bundling too much crap is a waste, even if they really just wanted to decrease their costs. Ironically, those two things actually mean the same thing! Or at least they should if all externalities were factored in. So they definitely did the right thing, even if for the wrong reasons. But that's capitalism and at least the incentive points in the right direction.
Woz is the king of hackers, of course he supports right-to-repair.
Depends on your perspective.
If you’re a greedy corporation, Jobs was right.
If you’re literally anyone else (not-greedy corporation, if they exist, or consumer) then Woz.
Personally I totally agree with Woz sentiment on right to repair. Absolutely right.
However from a software POV I absolutely love the Apple ecosystem and the level of integration that comes with it. I love that I don't need to think of my phone as a computer that needs protecting or configuring extensively.
So it's hard to say. I can talk all day how I agree with Woz in principal but ultimately I really enjoy using macOS and Steve Jobs vision is basically why it's ended up how it has.
I know I certainly would pick a repairable phone over an epoxy brick.
When most parts on a computer were through-hole components and relatively large integrated circuits that could easily be hand soldered, the skill required to participate in the repair process was much lower. Today, even relatively open hardware like a desktop PC has a ton of added complexity that would make people far less likely to ever want to attempt a repair on their own. While I've reflowed solder on a faulty GPU in the oven before, that's not exactly a good idea. A person is usually going to replace the things that have been component-ized like the RAM, GPU, SSD, motherboard, etc. rather than try to actually repair them.
Granted, when a component like that breaks on a PC you can just pop it open and replace it, rather than having to find a specialist to repair a laptop or phone where all the parts are glued in or soldered. While I can sympathize with people that do want that (there are projects out there trying to bring products in this category to market), I'm personally okay with that being the niche that it is. Most people didn't hack their computers back then and to this day most people don't hack on their computers.
There probably should be components available for experts like Louis Rossman who can replace these parts. There probably should be schematics available so they can more easily make these repairs and they can have businesses like his who can specialize in doing these sorts of repairs (they already do exist, clearly). Companies like Apple absolutely should not be using any sort of DRM to prevent use of third party hardware components in repairs. Going out of your way to make your devices difficult to repair is unethical. But I think we're well past the point that someone without specialized skills should be able to expect to repair any device that they purchase.
To have Woz-- the hacker's hacker-- answer like that was really shocking to me. (I was really, really sad to hear one of my childhood heroes answer in that way. I know, I know-- don't meet your heroes...)
In this recording his position sounds a lot more reasonable. It makes me glad to have such a well-respected voice out there driving conversation about this topic.
As an aside: I recorded my question and Woz's answer (albeit via my phone in my breast pocket, so the audio quality isn't very good) back in 2017. This was from his October 30, 2017 visit to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I didn't find a recording available online with a quick search, so here's this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lLz56N2PKCmPIGrzt1WT9n4B08P...
For what it's worth, when I think about the openness of the first computers I had, and how many crappy search bars and garbage things snuck past my unsuspecting parents while they used the computer, I'm surprisingly fine with the App Store, too. I don't have to worry about them installing garbage because it's gated by Apple. This is what made it "life changing" by Woz's words, and I agree with him.
There is a lot of benefit to apple's curation of the app store and the locked-down nature of ios brings a lot of security upsides. I have plenty of criticisms of apple's scummy behaviour (e.g. antenna gate) but the app store is not one of them.
The annoying part is how HN users want right to repair, but not enough to pick such options. I hate to say corporate marketing is stronger than the human brain.
Louis Rossman publicly asking Steve Wozniak to back right to repair because it's faster than finding someone in his social circle etc to pass the message
It had been, he said, the only source of profits at Apple for the company's first decade.
"How was Apple hurt by the openness of the Apple II?"
Meanwhile, if someone manages to reverse engineer a product, there is no reason why they shouldn't be able to fix their own product or offer a service for others to fix their products. But currently that is illegal due to the DMCA, and it should not be.
Both of these things should change in parallel.
Today, if there is a bug in your firmware you are pretty much hosed even if there is nothing wrong with it, physically. Some manufacturers are better than others, but some are so bad that flashing anything but some signed firmware image will just produce a brick. Most things that require this firmware to be uploaded at runtime reject unsigned firmware. So again, if there is a bug in there and whoever made it doesn't exist or doesn't care, there is basically nothing you can do.
For that reason I think that anything that requires firmware, or has a mechanism to update firmware should be required to allow loading custom firmware somehow. Maybe make it a switch, or require blowing a fuse and voiding the warranty, but it should absolutely be possible to do.
Problem is that this is fundamentally incompatible for a lot of hardware with the way DRM is implemented. For example, on Intel systems the motherboard firmware is involved in handling HDCP and there is something similar going on with HD Audio. Same with the GuC/HuC firmware for the iGPU. It't involved with handling hardware decoding and handling HDCP. No way that could be opened up without making the DRM scheme useless.
So how do you repair that vulnerability in your CPU when it's already out of support? If you could at least load unsigned microcode you could at least patch it yourself, but you can't, so your CPU remainins unfixable broken even though it's physically fine.
Similar things could be argued for regular software, but in the case of hardware repair it goes, or should go hand in hand with repairability. Otherwise you are quite limited in what kinda thing you can repair.
And right of access for the device-human configuration.
It's feasible, and not even very difficult, to make information on a website accessible to every browser since Mosaic, for example. And that's exactly what I do.
If your site has a "browser not good enough" message on it for some visitors, I think you should be just a little bit ashamed of yourself for giving up.
I think it is the difference between hack and craft.
poncy Someone, something or somewhere which is overpriced, over styled, over rated, or thinks more highly of itself than it deserves.
UPDATE: this is another comment which got heavily up-voted first and heavily down-woted shortly after. I always find such fluctuations curious.
