4 ms·

The naive outnumber the skilled by so very many... perhaps the skilled need different devices and different operating systems?

by chaz72 11y ago

6d0debc071 11y ago
Maybe. It's not clear to me how many people would go to the bother of unlocking their devices and then complain to Apple when something went wrong if there was some trivial roadblock. I'd also, on an ideological note, be inclined to be cautious about separating the consumers and the producers any more than they already are. One of the big promises of computers is that you can automate so much - granted a lot of people are cut off from that power - and I'd want to be going in the direction of making that power more accessible to people rather than less. If I'd had to, for example, buy a specialised programming computer with a programming OS when I was young... I'd probably not be a programmer today. That sort of thing seems like it would be very expensive. But you may very well turn out to be right - maybe most people can't be allowed to have nice things. :/ Depressing, if true, but not entirely implausible.
- chaz72 11y ago
  Unless you are trying to argue that iOS is replacing desktop operating systems, I don't see why the presence of a locked-down device is a threat to a general purpose computer. I find general purpose computers are not expensive at all and I don't particularly expect that to change.
mikeash 11y ago
This used to be Apple's key offering. They sold systems which were suitable for the skilled and the naive alike. It was wonderful because it meant that the naive could smoothly transition to being skilled, and the skilled could have all the comforts and ease of something suitable for the naive. Sadly, Apple seems to have given up on this and is now catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of power left in their stuff, but it's all left over from better days, and is slowly slipping away.
- copperx 11y ago
  It was Apple's offering only during OS X, and only because its BSD underpinnings. If Apple had chosen to build OS X on a homegrown kernel, Apple wouldn't have been appealing to the skilled.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I disagree that it was only during OS X. Classic Mac OS, and going back further the Apple IIs, were great for power users. I also don't understand your counterfactual. Apple didn't build OS X from scratch, they took NeXT's OS and ported it to Mac hardware and tweaked it. The result was something both powerful and easy to use. Making UNIX easy to use is not a trivial accomplishment! Yes, if Apple had done something completely different for their next-generation OS then maybe they would have ended up with something worse. But they didn't.
  - Margh 11y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, the only thing that convinced me to use a Mac (for a while) was the BSD base on some nice hardware. Without it it would be like trying to develop on iOS: slow, locked down and flashy.
- chaz72 11y ago
  I wasn't sure how to answer this yesterday. I never experienced Apple's "better days" as I've been developing in Windows for the last 20 years. Apple's current days, well, they seem pretty good for my needs, but I wasn't paying attention during the times you're talking about. I suppose when I need real control I would look to, say, OpenBSD instead, which I prefer to use remotely from a very pleasant and very predictable - but not super-powerful - Apple machine. Our needs, I'm sure, are not the same.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I like having an intuitive, easy-to-use WIMP system for my common tasks. I don't want to read my e-mail in a terminal window, or use some X11 chat app with a programmer-designed UI. I also like being able to get a terminal window to fiddle with the guts when I want it. Some tasks are better suited for that interface, and some powerful tools are only available there. During those better days, Apple fully embraced the UNIX nature of their OS, without compromising the usability of their GUI layer. They got Mac OS X certified by The Open Group. They started opensource.apple.com and distributed enough of the OS's guts that you could actually get a full Darwin OS up and running entirely from source, even if the result wasn't super useful. They gave out a full suite of developer tools free of charge that you could use to build powerful apps for the system, and were in fact the exact same tools that Apple used. Then iOS came. No more open source, except the absolute bare minimum they're required to distribute for open source licenses. (Their open source archive for iOS 9.0 contains a whole six packages, of which five are various parts of WebKit.) No more visibility into anything. Everything runs in a sandbox that you can't bypass by any means except finding a security vulnerability. The developer tools are still free, but if you want to actually use them to ship anything, or even run anything on real hardware locally, you have to pay and agree to their terms. (The "run anything on real hardware locally" bit has changed with Xcode 7, which is what f.lux was briefly taking advantage of, but this is new as of just a couple of months ago.) Apple suddenly wants to play gatekeeper to everything; if you want to ship apps to your customers, you have to first let Apple review and approve it, and they'll reject you if you don't follow their rules. The Mac retains much of what was great about it before, but it's slowly drifting the same way.

The naive outnumber the skilled by so very many... perhaps the skilled need different devices and different operating systems?

by chaz72 11y ago

The naive outnumber the skilled by so very many... perhaps the skilled need different devices and different operating systems?

6d0debc071 11y ago

Maybe. It's not clear to me how many people would go to the bother of unlocking their devices and then complain to Apple when something went wrong if there was some trivial roadblock. I'd also, on an ideological note, be inclined to be cautious about separating the consumers and the producers any more than they already are. One of the big promises of computers is that you can automate so much - granted a lot of people are cut off from that power - and I'd want to be going in the direction of making that power more accessible to people rather than less. If I'd had to, for example, buy a specialised programming computer with a programming OS when I was young... I'd probably not be a programmer today. That sort of thing seems like it would be very expensive. But you may very well turn out to be right - maybe most people can't be allowed to have nice things. :/ Depressing, if true, but not entirely implausible.

chaz72 11y ago
Unless you are trying to argue that iOS is replacing desktop operating systems, I don't see why the presence of a locked-down device is a threat to a general purpose computer. I find general purpose computers are not expensive at all and I don't particularly expect that to change.

mikeash 11y ago

This used to be Apple's key offering. They sold systems which were suitable for the skilled and the naive alike. It was wonderful because it meant that the naive could smoothly transition to being skilled, and the skilled could have all the comforts and ease of something suitable for the naive. Sadly, Apple seems to have given up on this and is now catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator. There's plenty of power left in their stuff, but it's all left over from better days, and is slowly slipping away.

copperx 11y ago
It was Apple's offering only during OS X, and only because its BSD underpinnings. If Apple had chosen to build OS X on a homegrown kernel, Apple wouldn't have been appealing to the skilled.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I disagree that it was only during OS X. Classic Mac OS, and going back further the Apple IIs, were great for power users. I also don't understand your counterfactual. Apple didn't build OS X from scratch, they took NeXT's OS and ported it to Mac hardware and tweaked it. The result was something both powerful and easy to use. Making UNIX easy to use is not a trivial accomplishment! Yes, if Apple had done something completely different for their next-generation OS then maybe they would have ended up with something worse. But they didn't.
- Margh 11y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, the only thing that convinced me to use a Mac (for a while) was the BSD base on some nice hardware. Without it it would be like trying to develop on iOS: slow, locked down and flashy.
chaz72 11y ago
I wasn't sure how to answer this yesterday. I never experienced Apple's "better days" as I've been developing in Windows for the last 20 years. Apple's current days, well, they seem pretty good for my needs, but I wasn't paying attention during the times you're talking about. I suppose when I need real control I would look to, say, OpenBSD instead, which I prefer to use remotely from a very pleasant and very predictable - but not super-powerful - Apple machine. Our needs, I'm sure, are not the same.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I like having an intuitive, easy-to-use WIMP system for my common tasks. I don't want to read my e-mail in a terminal window, or use some X11 chat app with a programmer-designed UI. I also like being able to get a terminal window to fiddle with the guts when I want it. Some tasks are better suited for that interface, and some powerful tools are only available there. During those better days, Apple fully embraced the UNIX nature of their OS, without compromising the usability of their GUI layer. They got Mac OS X certified by The Open Group. They started opensource.apple.com and distributed enough of the OS's guts that you could actually get a full Darwin OS up and running entirely from source, even if the result wasn't super useful. They gave out a full suite of developer tools free of charge that you could use to build powerful apps for the system, and were in fact the exact same tools that Apple used. Then iOS came. No more open source, except the absolute bare minimum they're required to distribute for open source licenses. (Their open source archive for iOS 9.0 contains a whole six packages, of which five are various parts of WebKit.) No more visibility into anything. Everything runs in a sandbox that you can't bypass by any means except finding a security vulnerability. The developer tools are still free, but if you want to actually use them to ship anything, or even run anything on real hardware locally, you have to pay and agree to their terms. (The "run anything on real hardware locally" bit has changed with Xcode 7, which is what f.lux was briefly taking advantage of, but this is new as of just a couple of months ago.) Apple suddenly wants to play gatekeeper to everything; if you want to ship apps to your customers, you have to first let Apple review and approve it, and they'll reject you if you don't follow their rules. The Mac retains much of what was great about it before, but it's slowly drifting the same way.