Video: Notion Ink Adam, iPad alternative

Linux, on your desktop or server, isn't something a reasonable person would compare to an iPhone. If you'd like to talk about Android devices vs. an iPhone, there are useful comparisons to be made (and Android may not come out ahead in all such comparisons).

I'll also ask what Linux distribution you're using, that would lead you to building things from source on a regular basis? I build things from source as part of my job and I don't even do it more than a couple of times per month. Nearly everything I use on my servers and desktops is available from yum or apt-get repositories, and it would never cross my mind to build from source, except for the tiny number of packages I need either custom build of, or I'm the developer of.

When I've maintained Mac and Windows servers, on the other hand, I was building software all the time. Everything I used had to be built from source. This has improved a little bit over the years, particularly on Mac OS X, in the form of fink, but a lack of a good standard package manager in Mac OS X and Windows is a major deterrent from me using them. Keeping on top of updates on a stack of a couple dozen packages all built from source, is a security and stability nightmare.

The average install/uninstall process is ridiculously easier on Mac OS X. Literally, it's: 1. Drag the single icon (regardless of instruction set or sizeof(int)) into your Applications folder. 2. Double-click the icon.

Oh yeah, step 1 is optional.

Certainly if Mac OS X were primarily used for installing command line tools / daemons, a package manager would be a stark omission. But that's not what the incredibly vast majority of its users do with it. For the average Mac OS X user, application management is more pleasant than for the average Linux user.

What happens when the user wants to install software that's not in one of the install's default repositories? The web page walks them through adding another repository URL to their package manager GUI [which is YA of a dozen]?

I'm attracted to the idea of just building a sufficiently sophisticated app management utility and then everything will work perfectly, but in practice it just doesn't seem to happen.

What a package manager does is build a necessarily-leaky abstraction over the set of operations needed to manage an application instance lifecycle. What if a non-experienced user wants to move an app from one system to another, though? No "mere mortal" is going to be able to accomplish that task on an average Linux box.

Mac OS X instead relies on a convention of bundling all necessary files together into an app bundle that's self-contained (and represented as such) and thus can be treated by the user as a cohesive, unitary Thing. Thus installation, deinstallation, sharing, and migration of the app are all done through an identical metaphor which also applies to the other filesystem entities that users care about: documents. So, sure, Mac OS X doesn't have "package management" (as part of the vendor install) but its users have a more pleasant and unified experience. This provides a tremendously better sense of empowerement and relaxation to most users than a wholly separate GUI full of messages about "dependency resolution" and the like. Again, I understand where you're coming from, and in certain aspects and particular vertical instances I have no doubt the Linux automatic installer over package manager model could provide a better experience, but the average computer user is far better off with a less sophisticated system.

(Yes, many Mac OS X apps use a separate install routine. I think this is unfortunate, but I don't get the sense that it's high on Apple's agenda because they're so pleased with the App Store model, which is another essay for another time.)

I really really like how they actually spent time thinking about how people will use the device instead of spending man years being concerned about how the bezel looks with aluminum hi-lights.

Trackpad on the back? Brilliant!

Pixel Qi display so I can read in sunlight? Awesome!

3 USB ports, why? 1 for keyboard, 1 for mouse and 1 for a thumb drive. Fantastic!

Now sell it for $250 and I'll have it in my backpack tomorrow.

Mac OS X app installation is terrible. That's just a fact. It's been well known and discussed by Mac nerds for years:

"As someone who has answered tech support email for a Mac developer, I can confirm that the entire concept of a disk image is mighty confusing to many non-technical users, including many who have been using Macs for years, but don’t install new software very often.

I think the recent trend of including a background picture in the disk image window, which instructs the user to copy the application icon to /Applications (or wherever), goes a long way to removing the confusion. But I agree with Mr. Frank that compressed archives (like StuffIt) are easier for most users to understand."

http://daringfireball.net/2002/11/dmg

The only reason people put up with it because it mostly works for geeks and it's better than Windows (and even then it's not hard to find people who will argue that download from random website and double-click is a better user experience despite all the damage it's caused)

All the improvements of note in Mac OS X install seem to have happened because 3rd parties notice the confusion and adopt conventions to overcome the difficulties. Note also the amount of work put into 3rd party update via Sparkle which is part of package management too.