Earlier quoted context omitted.
and the comodore 64 was a kit?
The 64 appeared much later.
True, but the Commodore PET was released in 1977. No assembly required. Another example is the Tandy TRS-80 Model I, also released in 1977.
IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Android is neither as easy to use or as sexy as the iPhone. The dismal sales of the nexus one despite it's superior spec sheet and androidness are proof of this. But I do agree with you, most people buy things out of which they get the most utility, and ease of use an sexiness are a big part of that. But the person I was responding to mad the claim that people won't buy the ipad because it is closed. It would only be…
Android is neither as easy to use or as sexy as the iPhone. The dismal sales of the nexus one despite it's superior spec sheet and androidness are proof of this. It's silly to use Nexus One sales as proof of anything because it's had almost no marketing. The Droid has sold far better: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/31410/Day-74-Sales-Apple-iPhone-v...
True. But if you compared those numbers to the sales of the iPhone 3G or 3GS, they would look less rosy. What you've got there is a non-smartphone without an app store on a smaller carrier being compared with a smartphone with an app store on a larger carrier that's famous of not having many options in the phones you can select because of its CDMA network.
Anyway, the whole discussion of which is doing better is completely unrelated to my original objection to the top-level poster.
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're wrong. Read section 3.3.2 of http://www.eff.org/files/20100302_iphone_dev_agr.pdf Search the document for "interpreted code" They expressly forbid it except for "included interpreters" aka javascript. So hypercard is out of the running.
Corona SDK http://anscamobile.com/corona/ is Lua underneath, and has been used by quite a few (at least 20) approved iPhone apps.
I think you can have an interpreter underneath, as long as it can't obtain code that isn't shipped with the app.
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#54By these standards, hasn't Steve Jobs been notching up final victories over Woz for at least 25 years? In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read people claiming it repeatedly! As far back as the early 80s, the Mac marks the turning point where Apple became primarily focused on a self-contained, don't-touch-the-tech computing appliance. The introduction of the Mac, and the way it won out over the Apple II successors, also ma…
It's not as if this is a recent idea Apple's had. No Macs ever prevented you from running and distributing whatever software you wanted. And while there wasn't a command line before OS X, there were a great deal of opportunities for hacking via extensions, ResEdit, HyperCard, etc.
That is primarily because they couldn't. But note the distinct lack of hardware expansion on early models: [ http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.txt ].
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Android is neither as easy to use or as sexy as the iPhone. The dismal sales of the nexus one despite it's superior spec sheet and androidness are proof of this. But I do agree with you, most people buy things out of which they get the most utility, and ease of use an sexiness are a big part of that. But the person I was responding to mad the claim that people won't buy the ipad because it is closed. It would only be…
I think the effect is real, but of course it's not as direct as this. Now that the iPhone has a viable competitor that's more developer friendly, it seems likely that apps will start to appear first on Android, and then only later on the iPhone. I think that might effect consumers' perception of which is the sexier device.
Having a platform that's easier to develop, publish and distribute software for is only half of the "developer friendly" equation. The other half is having a user community that's willing to spend money on that software.
Are there many Android developers who've been able to quit their day jobs and make a living from app sales? (That's a serious question, not a snarky one -- I don't follow the market closely.)
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#56Woz has always about being open and modular and extensible. Jobs has always been about the opposite -- and for good reason; the early Macs were typically more stable and functioned better simply because of that lock-in. But history has played this over and over again, and Woz always wins. Vendors work out standards; the user experience consolidates. If you give people the freedom and trust them, they'll work it out.…
Keep in mind it's not 1976 or 1984. Things are different today. Technology is no longer reserved for the technical elite to enjoy or fetishize over exclusively. If you want to draw a line in the sand to figure out when things changed I'd say 2001 and the introduction of the iPod -- an incredibly closed but amazingly compelling and easy to use mainstream device that smashed its open competition with no mercy. This was about the same time we saw the rise of the cell phone in every pocket which was similarly closed and restricted. Around the same time we saw the release of the Playstation 2 which, again, is a closed and restricted platform that has gone on to be the best selling gaming console in history. 3 years later we see the release of the Nintendo DS -- one of the most successful mobile electronic devices in history. Closed & restricted.
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#57I found this quote from Wozniak in Founders at Work to be ironic. "You'd go to the store and they'd just have all this stuff that you could buy to enhance the Apple II. So one of our big keys to success was that we were very open. There's a big world out there for other people to come and join us."
From a practical consumer standpoint you can also buy lots of accessories to enhance your iPod/iPhone/iPad. Apps, cases, car integration kits, home players, even a little dongle you can stick in your shoe for running, a credit card swiper, etc. Obviously it's not open but it's the same practical effect in the end. The ecosystem around everything i____ is a big part of Apple's success today.
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
But of course those demos were very limited in scope, because the development techniques used to create them were impossible to scale up.
Forgive me if I'm being dense, but I'm not certain what that has to do with the point being made. Could you explain it in greater detail? My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's put it on a website" is not a viable method. You can write many types of apps that way, certainly, but you pretty much give up anything so much as pretending to be performance. Additionally, it prevents you…
My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's put it on a website" is not a viable method.
But if you recall what Hypercard stacks were like, then putting it on a website that's specially tailored to make it easy, combined with a local app to make things more seamless, might actually be a money making proposition.
Put the hacking open/closed politics aside. What do you think about the idea as a business?
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#59> Wozniak, an inveterate prankster, ran an illegal "dial-a-joke" operation "illegal"?! I am not aware it would be illegal to run such a service at that time. > the Macintosh was a radical innovation in its own right, being the first mass-produced computer to feature a "mouse" and a "desktop Lisa? Star? Although that last one was not "mass-produced", at least it came out of a factory.
At the time, you weren't allowed to hook arbitrary equipment up to the phone system -- everything had to be approved by AT&T. IIRC the hardware Woz used for his dial-a-joke setup was homebrew.
Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak
#60It might overrun Sony and Microsoft in computer gaming
I don't understand.. how?
At best, I see it appealing to a small niche gaming market, but as it stands, I can't see how it would overrun Sony or Microsoft - for example, the iPad is hugely underpowered compared to todays popular gaming machines and you would definitely need to couple it with some other input devices, like keyboard & mouse or gamepads, since multitouch alone doesn't seem all that suitable for a lot of games IMHO.