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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

#131

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

Right, and all that goodness would be destroyed for your family if others could run Ruby scripts on the device.

I imagine you should be able to see the difference between not targeting a particular audience and doing everything to lock that particular audience out.

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

#132

Post by sofal »

wildjim wrote: post #49
rimantas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 millio…

What's wierd about what you've just said is that you obviously don't have a web tablet -- a Nokia N810, a Samsung Q1, a Viliv S5, a UMID mbook... ? What really makes the iPad any more special, especially considering the price? Please don't say the UI, as it's not so well loved by everyone...

What really makes the [Apple product] any more special, especially considering the price?

Please don't say the UI, as it's not so well loved by everyone...

I don't know what to say to that if you don't already know by now. What answer are you looking for? That Apple customers are brainless sheep?

Who's "everyone"? Everyone whose opinions you like to read on the Internet?

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

#133

Post by aneesh »

actf wrote: post #98
mattmanser wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is alarmist nonsense. The App store and the iPhone have fostered a colossal amount of innovation, and made a lot of normal non-techy people very, very happy. And a bunch of techies too. And in the end I hope it doesn't come down to open source advocates getting their way so they can install vim, but it being about my Mum being able to use it without having to phone me saying that it's all gone wrong again and ca…

>it being about my Mum being able to use it without having to phone me saying that it's all gone wrong again You're confusing correlation with causation. The fact that your Mum has been unable to use devices in the past is not _caused_ by the devices being open platforms. Lots of people can't even operate a dvd player and they are certainly locked down devices. Being easy to operate and being locked down are mutually…

You don't mean mutually exclusive. You mean independent.

If events A & B are mutually exclusive, it means that if A happens, then B cannot happen, and vice-versa

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

#134

Post by GHFigs »

stanleydrew wrote: post #123
GHFigs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet when you go to a restaurant you order off the menu.

This is definitely a stretch. When I go to a restaurant I'm choosing a priori to give up control of my possible choices when I decide to go. There's no confusion. If I wanted to have full control I'd stay home and cook. I suppose the argument then is that you choose to limit yourself to what the iPad offers by buying and using one. As long as a priori most people understand what they are getting themselves into when…

The problem is that a lot of people aren't going to understand beforehand the limitations of this device...

You seem to be assuming several things: that this is peculiar to the iPad, that people who do understand the limitations also care, and that if they don't make fully informed choices about things they care about that it is someone's fault other than their own.

I don't think those are accurate assumptions.

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

#135

Post by Todd »

raganwald wrote: post #72
Todd wrote: post #48

I know of no other company that can charge $100 for 16GB of flash memory. Differentiating on real features like 3G is good and expected. Differentiating on commodity hardware like memory is unfair. With the ubiquity of SD and micro SD and need for more and more storage due to the explosion of digital media, they don't even provide a port. Obviously, they don't provide a port because it would destroy their product lin…

I know of no other company that can charge $100 for 16GB of flash memory. Differentiating on real features like 3G is good and expected. Differentiating on commodity hardware like memory is unfair. Ahem: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/blu-ray-maker-re-boxe...

LOL. That's one of the best.

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

#136

Post by GHFigs »

mcantelon wrote: post #130
GHFigs wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "power users".

At the minimum, people who wnat to use software more powerful than iPhone apps (Photoshop, music production, programming, etc.).

I don't understand. How does buying an iPad prevent people from using other computers for those purposes, or wanting to, aside from the opportunity cost of actually buying the device?

You seem to be talking about things that machines can do, but you're referring to people. If a machine is limited it does not follow to say that the person is limited.

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

#137

Post by krakensden »

izendejas wrote: post #109
lambda wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, this isn't about giving the users freedom from choice; with 140,000 options in the App Store, that's a lot of choices. This is explicitly about locking developers down, and not allowing them to do things that Apple does not approve of. Want to write a competing web browser? Sorry, you can't. Want to write an awesome JIT that optimizes itself for their shiny new chip? No can do. Imagine if this policy had been in…

Your third paragraph sums up the link very well. Yes, many customers win in the short-term, but they will lose in the long run. I'm one that thinks web apps are the future, anyway, so Apple's focus on specialized apps that can't be ported to other platforms very easily and without having to invest a whole lot up front is going to bite them hard. When html5 matures and is more widely adopted, developers will sidestep…

When html5 matures? Seriously? Have you ever done any web development? Have you looked at html5? It's an incremental upgrade, nothing that's going to let you do new interesting things with all the new, interesting hardware we have. Plus, it will still be very, very slow compared to code running through fewer layers of indirection.

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

#138

Post by NathanKP »

GHFigs wrote: post #136
mcantelon wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the minimum, people who wnat to use software more powerful than iPhone apps (Photoshop, music production, programming, etc.).

I don't understand. How does buying an iPad prevent people from using other computers for those purposes, or wanting to, aside from the opportunity cost of actually buying the device? You seem to be talking about things that machines can do, but you're referring to people. If a machine is limited it does not follow to say that the person is limited.

Of course the person is limited. They are limited because they can't for example, install Firefox on the iPad and use it as the browser rather than Safari. The person is limited because the locked nature of the device limits them.

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

#139

Post by Raphael_Amiard »

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 problem in what you're saying is that it wouldn't have been THAT hard to do a product that does both : Add an usb port and add the ability to install custom software, even if hidden in the bottom of the OS where your grandma doesn't even notices it, and you have a device that pleases everyone. I still don't really get why they wouldn't do such a thing.

EDIT: I'm kind of getting sick of this. Basically all the posts on this thread sum up to this:

Some guy say "Yeah but my grandma can use it !". And gets tremendously upvoted, so ok guys we get the point.

And some other guy says "Yeah ok, but what prevents this slick grandma-friendly platform to be open at the same time", and the guy get less upvoted, like the very point of this Ipad is that it be user friendly, like we hackers don't care at all about openness, denying the very point of this article, wich IS :

"Why can't we have a platform that is BOTH user friendly and slick, and open"

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

#140

Post by Raphael_Amiard »

potatolicious wrote: post #112
Scriptor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netbooks, which are basically the same price or cheaper, can do the same as the above and are much less locked in. More immediately, they also have Flash support, multitasking, and USB ports. People still need more heavy-duty computers to do those other things as well as for non-leisure stuff. The advantage of an iPhone was that it was extremely portable and you could just pull it out on the bus to pass the time. The…

> "can do the same as the above" I heartily disagree. There's a big difference, huge difference between "can barely" and "does it really fucking well". The iPad shoots for the latter (we'll see if it hits), the netbook's mere existence is predicated on the former. If your definition of "can do the same" means "someone willing to bang their head hard enough and willing to live with a substandard user experience can do…

> I don't think geeks still get why Apple is successful

No they don't, that's probably why everyone on this thread is saying the same thing as you ..

> the constant spec-based wankery

The way you actually transform platform openness into spec-based wankery is beyond me.

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