How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos, look at photos of their kids/grandkids, send e-mails to their relatives oversees, and read their favorite books on it, all without the need for a "computer-savvy guy" who has to teach them how it works, and fix it when it's broken. In other words, it's a logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution. I understand you need to run your Ruby scripts, but this product was designed for the 99% of the people in this country instead. You're not the target audience.

That Apple is creating a closed system is of little surprise. Steve Jobs is all about control. It works in the short term, but I believe it will bite them in the ass over the long-term.

Making use of a closed-system and trying to be the best in a category assumes that you have access to the most brilliant minds in that field, and the most brilliant marketing campaign. What makes Apple great? Well, they can control every aspect of their production because they own all their own tools and can keep out the crap. Also, they have slick industrial design. For now they also have some of the most brilliant minds in the industry, but not all of them. This is why they will never achieve world domination with their products. I suppose I could make use of their own advertising to make an example : "I'm a mac, I'm a PC". You are either an apple person or you're not. Their closed-system allows little flexibility. They would be doomed to what they used to be were it not for them opening their file formats to standards.

Why is this not the best approach? Because of human innovation. People hate being held down, forced into one category, etc. This is what apple is doing, but because their products are so innovative, consumers will go for it.

Google is much smarter; they know what to hold onto and what to open up for the masses. Even though they employ many geniuses, they are always on the search for new innovative ideas. That's why they purchase so many startups, or so I've been told.

That's why I believe in a race between Google and Apple, Apple WILL lose eventually.

Closed-systems should actually drive innovation because they must be circumvented. That's why Apple products are cracked all the time. So I guess the challenge then is, that if you aren't happy with Apple, build a better product and market it as well as they do. All things being equal, the open-system product will win every time. You can't employ all of the brightest people yourself, all of the time. I think Apple will learn this in due time, and then things will change.

A sidenote is that a large part of Apple's appeal is simplicity because of their closed-system. If anyone could create an opem-system as turnkey as theirs, they'd come ahead by far. I think one of the closest systems to being fully open and turnkey I've seen so far is Facebook Connect, but I'm starting to become too long-winded, so I'll leave it at that.

I wonder, how many people were sad when gearbox in their car went from stick to auto, when choke control disappeared, when you could no longer tinker with carburetor, because it was gone.

There will always be two groups of people, one group of those wanting to hack things, and another, much much larger group of those who want just use them. For every one John who wants to chip his car engine there will be five millions Joes who just want to get from the point A to the point B with the least hassle possible. As it happens Apples iProducts are aimed at the second group—deal with it. Just like ITMS and App Store may be the fastest and most hassle-free way to get what you want on your device.

I've spent some time thinking, do I want iPad. The answer is: I do. I like to read when in bed, iPad is perfect for this. I cannot take my iMac to bed, and reading with notebook is not as convenient as it can be with iPad: that damn keyboard gets in a way, event when I barely use it.

iPad is very well suited for what it is intended for: surfing the web, reading the books, some email. Let's not forget it has UI specifically tailored for the device and multitouch use. It should be great for tasks it was meant to do, and not so great for all others.

It is time to stop thinking about anything with CPU inside as the computer.

You could ssh onto a cloud/unix server and write all the scripts and tools you want.

I used my iphone once to code small scripts and start/stop batch jobs on a work server while on the go.

The logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution is the person doesn't control their device?! That's not revolutionary; that's a return to the bad old days...