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

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

#61

Post by KirinDave »

david927 wrote: post #45
coffeemug wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos Oh, but they can't because those are on YouTube and it doesn't do Flash. Simple doesn't have to mean purposely disabled to make more money.

This would be a valid concern if it were true. If:

1. Youtube DIDN'T have an HTML5 video mode (both non-web and web).

or:

2. Apple were somehow asking people to pay for Flash support and profiting from that.

Since neither is true, your concern here seems unsupported.

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

#63

Post by orangecat »

wooster wrote: post #29
keltex wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"design will be shit"? I think that the Nexus One has eliminated that argument.

Really? Everyone I know who has used one says that bottom touch bar is a PITA. It keeps getting hit by accidental touches. Speaking of which, if you have a touch screen, why do you need that many hardware controls?

Huh, I like it. Especially the universal back button; it provides a much better flow than the iPhone where you have to go back to the home screen and relaunch the app you were in when you got a text message.

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

#64

Post by Scriptor »

GHFigs wrote: post #47
aw3c2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you get that stuff on it without being able to plug in a USB drive?

How do you get the text you're reading right now on your computer without being able to plug in a USB drive?

That just means a device for people who have very few technical skills will need a near-constant and perfectly working internet connection to be passably useful.

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

#65

Post by lambda »

coffeemug wrote: post #12
zacharypinter wrote: post #2

This post adequately sums up my concerns. Here we have a device that doesn't support USB thumbdrives, doesn't support dropbox (at least system-wide, I assume the dropbox iphone app would work), is unable to run ruby or any of my other dev scripts/tools, cannot install firefox or firefox plugins, etc. I do not want to see computing head this direction.

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…

The thing is, without an open platform, the new, innovative ways of working with this machine will never be invented.

This is about far more than running your own Ruby scripts. It's about the fact that true innovation cannot exist in such an environment. And the problem is, you will not see what you're missing; people won't bother developing new technologies that have no platform they can legally run on.

Would the Web exist if Microsoft had been able to ban Netscape from running on Windows? What new, groundbreaking technologies are we missing out on because it's not worth the time and effort to create something new if the platform vendor can simply forbid you from publishing it?

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

#66

Post by Todd »

jwhitlark wrote: post #20
coffeemug wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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...

I guess their 1984 ad campaign was more precient than Steve could have imagined. The surprise is that he is the old guy on the screen. Now, who's the woman throwing the hammer?

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

#67

Post by swannodette »

jwhitlark wrote: post #20
coffeemug wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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...

I recommend you read this if you want a reminder about what the personal computer revolution is all about: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf. The point is to get to the point where people actually give a damn about computers.

As much as I love esoteric computer languages and UNIX, I don't consider those to be the paragons of the promise of computers.

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

#68

Post by akeefer »

zacharypinter wrote: post #2

This post adequately sums up my concerns. Here we have a device that doesn't support USB thumbdrives, doesn't support dropbox (at least system-wide, I assume the dropbox iphone app would work), is unable to run ruby or any of my other dev scripts/tools, cannot install firefox or firefox plugins, etc. I do not want to see computing head this direction.

To put it in a different context, a lot of people (myself included, and I'm a hardcore techy) prefer to play video games on consoles rather than PCs so as to avoid dealing with all these headaches. You want to just put the game in, press play, and it works, without dealing with device drivers and hardware incompatibilities and software version conflicts.

The fact that the model is now being extended to things like web browsing and e-mail isn't necessarily a bad thing for 90%+ of the population who just want a device that always works (and always works the same way). It's turning functions formerly reserved for a computer proper and moving into the closed-off-but-much-more-straightforward consumer electronics space.

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

#69

Post by orangecat »

jakarta wrote: post #7

Apple has managed to maintain consistency and provide a level of experience over the years by tightly controlling the platform. This is just another manifestation of that. Look at the App store, the fact that you have to use hacks to get OS X running on a PC or that you buy Apple computers with OS X being pre-loaded as examples of that. If you don't like the closed platform you can grab a PC, but I think this is just…

Macs are wide open. Apple creates the default user experience, but you're free to develop and run any software you want without begging for permission. Apple's total control over the iPhone/iPod/iPad platform is a change for the worse.

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

#70

Post by mildweed »

If I were Adobe, I'd be furious. Exclusion of Flash from this platform is a slap in the face, despite Jobs' perspective of how it would break his App Store model. If it weren't for Adobe focusing their Creative Suite development on Jobs' platforms, Apple wouldn't have had the design community's support that it had for so many years. Apple owes Adobe.
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