8 ms·

On the iPad

143 points by twampss 17y ago

dschobel 17y ago
Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent with my own. It's pretty odd to me how people have willingly accepted Apple's closed phone and media player ecosystem without batting an eye-lash, but the iPad is just outrageous as it encroaches on the PC. Isn't the iPad just a logical continuation of Apple's trajectory of the last decade?
- tlack 17y ago
  But I think people understand the limits of a phone that means it might have to be closed (after all, phones were closed for 15 years before we started seeing "open" ones), and people saw the crazy copyright battles that went on that lead to a big restriction in music copying freedom. On the other hand, we've had programmable computers in our homes for 30 years.. we aren't ready to give that up.
  - dschobel 17y ago
    I suppose, but from a Stallman-esque strictly engineering point of view, it's all just software running on hardware and the fact that you call one with a 4" display a phone makes everyone accept it being closed but a 10" display crosses the boundary into PC territory and now it's outrageous to be closed. It strikes me as an arbitrary distinction to make.
  - ryandvm 17y ago
    Or maybe we are. That's what Jobs/Apple are betting. Apple thinks that people have tired of dealing with anti-virus and task managers and package installers and folders and system updates. Perhaps they're right, there is definitely a segment of the market that just wants a web browser and some rich media. They don't care about multi-tasking or customization. If the iPad takes off, you can bet that locked down versions of OSX won't be far behind. Google is headed in a similar direction with ChromeOS. Apple's vision: "We'll give you an awesome experience, but you're going to pay us a little bit at a time for all of it." Google's vision: "We'll give you an awesome experience for free, but you're going to tell us everything about you."
    - adamc 17y ago
      I find myself in the uncomfortable position of preferring Microsoft's vision.
      - DannoHung 17y ago
        "We'll give you a shitty experience and if we become popular, then you don't get any choice on top of that!"
      - ericd 17y ago
        There's always Linux...
      - tomjen2 17y ago
        I can't say that I necessary disagree, but the thought that my future freedom depend upon Microsoft rubs me the wrong way. But at least I will now have a reason to join the evil empire.
  - dschobel 17y ago
    I agree, and I'm not even trying to broach the politics of it being a closed system. I'm just wondering why lots of very tech savvy people have never minded their ipods, cellphones, gaming consoles, etc, etc, etc being closed. Maybe we should have been protesting those all along? Otherwise how do you reconcile accepting all of those but rejecting this device?
    - orangecat 17y ago
      Opportunity cost. The iPhone, and the iPad to an even greater extent, have lots of potential that can't be (easily/legally) utilized because of Apple's control. That's not true of earlier phones, which were too technically limited to do a whole lot even if they were open. It's also not true of consoles which are just locked down PCs; there's not much you could do with a hacked Xbox that you couldn't also do with a Mac mini.
    - tlack 17y ago
      I can only speak for myself, but I rarely want to change the way I work with my phone (well, more so lately, but that's a separate Blackberry rant ;) ), and I wouldn't ever want to change the way my mp3 player would work if I had one. But I almost always want to change the way my computer works, since I interact with it in such a rich way and it provides me all of my money. I want that flexibility to hone my tools, but I don't want the flexibility to hone all of my tools..
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  I agree that iPad is a culmination of Apple's trajectory of the last decade, maybe Steve Job's trajectory for his career. It's a triumph of creating something entirely designed to meet people immediate needs while not having any rough edges. And extensibility is inherently a rough edge. But that doesn't change from the negative points the article makes - it illuminates them.
tlack 17y ago
Beware, ranty comment follows: There's another possibility here. Microsoft succeeded because of their focus on developers and, to some extent, having an open ecosystem as long as it suited their business goals. Forgetting this may be Apple's first slip up. When OS X came out, tons of amazing apps came out that got many people switching: if Apple turns off those same developers, the platform will weaken.
- umtrey 17y ago
  People didn't switch to the Mac in droves when XCode came out, or when Apple switched to OS X. It took a closed platform - a perfectly cultured, strictly defined environment that was the iPod to start building the halo (and with that, peoples' trust) towards the desktop/laptop Mac. The iPhone didn't get the buzz or the acclaim because of the App Store - it became thought of as a gift from the heavens! Steve has blessed us with this new way to add our value to the closed product. Watch this happen in a different extent with the iPad - something new will come up that will open it up ever so slightly, adding new features where Apple doesn't have the creative or physical capacity to develop.
  - orangecat 17y ago
    It took a closed platform - a perfectly cultured, strictly defined environment that was the iPod to start building the halo (and with that, peoples' trust) towards the desktop/laptop Mac. There are many plausible interpretations of history. Mine is that Mac market share took off around the same time as the ascendancy of laptops, when screens and mobile CPUs got to the point where they were no longer hugely inferior to desktops. Mac laptop sales exploded because they're both more aesthetically appealing (which matters more for laptops since other people see them) and more functional (e.g. sleep and wireless actually work reliably). I also think early alpha geek adoption of OS X helped to a lesser extent, both in terms of the software they created and in recommendations to friends and family. The iPhone/iPad may become like Windows in the 90s: what developers write for during the day to pay the bills, while they do their hacking on platforms that don't frustrate their desires.
joe_the_user 17y ago
I personally feel more optimistic than most commentators concerning what "most people" will want. I think that a large enough group of people will continue to want an extensible machine that closed systems like the ipad will have trouble seeming like a good deal - a Mac or a PC might a bit harder to use but it does have that one extra program you have to use sometimes.
wvenable 17y ago
Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history I disagree. We're in a time of change now -- very soon we won't be getting any of media in the same old ways. TV will be replaced with digital streaming. Music, for the younger generation, is already almost entirely digital. It's even becoming perfectly reasonable to read books on digital devices now. However, this digital future is not open to everyone. My parents have a hell of time operating a computer and don't benefit from the latest streaming media technologies. They get their music on CD's. They read books on paper. The general purpose computer has failed them. Why shouldn't Apple fill this gap between the TV and the computer? I'm sure Apple fans will lament the loss of general purpose computing devices from Apple. But it doesn't mean that the hacker era is dead. It just means that most hackers may have to look somewhere else to find a product that suits them.
mdg 17y ago
The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. Upon reading that, I was immediately reminded of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 minus the sledge.
- bitwize 17y ago
  There was another article linked to here, said something like Apple was now the face on the screen, not the woman with the hammer. I think a lot of us recalled that old commercial...
deleted 17y ago
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butterfi 17y ago
"Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history" Perhaps the microwave signals an end to the chef era of cooking history.
- ynniv 17y ago
  That might be my favorite iPad analogy yet. Will people please stop calling this the end of computing? If not for me, do it for CoCo [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/23/44346/3789 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/23/44346/3789]
- dschobel 17y ago
  If you write software for a living you have to write for whichever platform the market dictates.
- holygoat 17y ago
  In a very real way, it did. Fifty or sixty years ago, people prepared food largely from scratch. Now, a large proportion of the population of Western nations prepares food by poking a hole in the plastic cover, closing the door, and hitting "Express". Similarly, one possible future prompted by the iPad is one where "chefs" (hackers) do food preparation, but most people hit the power button. Al3x is asserting that this is bad because there's not really much of a path from 'here' to 'there'. You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it.
  - adriand 17y ago
    > You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it. What if you get started by writing HTML and Javascript code into a nice online editor - something like Bespin, or like those many different sites where you can code in all sorts of languages using a web-based front-end - and you get to publish your results to a web page and see the results immediately? Does it get any easier than that? Code - publish - save to home screen - "hey dad, check out this application I just made!"
swannodette 17y ago
"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." I simply do not buy this. A tinkerer is born a tinkerer. I had a Mac in the late 80s and throughout the 90s and the only way to program the damn thing was to beg my folks to shell a couple hundred bucks for CodeWarrior and another couple hundred bucks for Apple Reference books. The dev tools today for the iPad cost $99, the reference is free with the tools. If I was a father right now and I had a ten year-old-tinkerer I'd buy one, give it to my kid, get them a dev account and say, "Hack the shit out of this thing." EDIT: "A tinkerer is born a tinkerer + some parental encouragement". When my parents (who at the time had little money, father was in the Army) bought our first Apple IIgs, he said "You should learn how to write your own programs for it". I didn't even know what programming was. But this was enough to make me hunt school libraries for books on BASIC.
- deleted 17y ago
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  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    I can tell you from experience of having 7 siblings that if you gave them a iPad and gave them the dev tools, they (95% of people) wouldn't bother. But is this really different? Ten years ago, did more than 5% of people feel the need to tinker with their computer under the hood?
  - swannodette 17y ago
    I didn't say the problem was the cost of development tools. "can tell you from experience of having 7 siblings that if you gave them a iPad and gave them the dev tools, they (95% of people) wouldn't bother." You can say that about the computer you're typing on. According to what you've just said the end of encouraging a "hacker like mentality" began with arrival of easy to use computers 25 years ago.
- prospero 17y ago
  The dev tools today for the iPad cost $99, the reference is free with the tools. And how much for the computer which is capable of running those dev tools? The point is that the iPad isn't a device which can be used to modify itself, and if it entirely supplants other computers in a household, your experience becomes completely dictated by what other people have created.
bliss 17y ago
I half agree with the sentiment here, except... This thing is Gaol Bait if I've ever seen it, I give it a week after launch before arbitrary code execution is possible. Voila, now you can write your own software/tweak away till your heart's content. Seems an uncool thing to say, but you know what? I'm waiting in that line! I think it looks great.
morlockhq 17y ago
That's why my kids are growing up with those clunky ugly computers that the Mac loathes running a completely open operating system with every imaginable programming language at their finger tips. It won't be pretty, but neither was the Timex Sinclair 1000 that was the first computer that I programmed with BASIC.
derefr 17y ago
Remember: The iPad has an app store. Until that is no longer true, Apple will always sell a product that runs XCode and targets that app store, and targets its own platform in order to develop new versions of XCode. Further, because Apple doesn't want to deal with people pushing broken "test" updates to their servers, they'll always have a Simulator program. And, even if every other open platform disappears, you'll always be able to tinker inside that simulator. /pragmatic pessimism
CamperBob 17y ago
This is why I say that the iPad is a cynical thing: Apple can’t – or won’t – conceive of a future for personal computing that is both elegant and open, usable and free. Sheesh. It's not a computer. It's an appliance. If you want an open programmable device, they will cheerfully sell you a Mac. The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. And if I had a dishwasher rather than a real computer as a kid, I'd never be a programmer today, either. Oh, wait. The two have nothing to do with each other, except that they both contain microprocessors.
- sofal 17y ago
  Is it really that hard to picture people using iPads instead of traditional computers?
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    If a closed system ends up working better for some people, all I can say is... whose fault is that?
richcollins 17y ago
I see this as a huge opportunity to have even more people try my creations. Many of the people using iPhones and presumably iPads might never had considered using a web app or traditional desktop app.
- dannyr 17y ago
  I think Alex's main point is that this device is more for people who consume rather than people who create.
  - richcollins 17y ago
    Yes and that is a good thing. We'll have our devices for creating as well. It's not taking from us, its adding to everyone else.
jazzychad 17y ago
"...if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." Whoa now. If I were a kid (and a tinkerer) and saw an iPad, I would immediately think, "how can I make something to run on this??" and go off and learn. People still have to write apps for this thing. Just because you cannot actively develop code on it does not mean that it will discourage young tinkerers from learning about programming (for iPad or any other platform). Apple will continue to create "full computers" if for no other reason than for developers to create software for their "closed computers." That endgame would be sad, but we won't witness the death of desktop/laptop computers. If someone is so concerned about teaching programming using the iPad, could one not write a BASIC app or some such? That's how I started learning to program: on a VTech computer when I was a kid... it was basically a 1x20 LCD output screen attached to a keyboard and 8 D-Cell batteries. It was mainly to teach typing and had a few trivia games, but it also had a BASIC mode... a very closed device with a BASIC app, sound familiar? Also, let's not forget about young programmers learning how to do web-based sites/apps. They are not as powerful/fast as native apps, but at least it is a fast/easy/free way to start learning about programming/UI/etc and see it realized on the newest/hottest device. That would be exciting to me as a kid. Webapps are gateway drugs to native apps, trust me. EDIT: found a picture of the old VTech computer - http://rasterweb.net/raster/computers/images/vtech.jpg http://rasterweb.net/raster/computers/images/vtech.jpg
- eplanit 17y ago
  But Whoa on that 'Whoa'. There's a huge difference: the PC came with vendor and third-party technical reference and programming manuals, BIOS references, etc. It was a world that encouraged that kind of curiosity and creativity. Now, a kid who does that is a "jailbreaker", and can be sued by Apple for DMCA violations, etc. My own personal Apple experience: Age 17, Apple II. Open the covers, look at the circuitry, look at sample programs....a career began. New technologists need as many legal reference books as they do technical reference books. (Listen to the old guy refer to 'books') :-)
cpr 17y ago
Well, let's find out just how true this is. As someone else remarked, if you want to hack, get the dev kit and start hacking (yes, $99/year; think of it as the tinkerer's software upgrade; we've already hashed that out elsewhere on HN). I also think some of us should start submitting things like Squeak ports (with suitable UI upgrades for touch) as educational apps. I'll bet Apple would let 'em through, because they're no threat to the ecosystem. I know there are simple programming languages out there on the App Store (e.g., some calculators allow Fortran-like expressions, etc.), so there's not really a ban on programming environments. In fact, I think the ban in place on scripting language is precisely and exactly to keep Flash off the machine, and I don't blame Apple for wanting to keep that barrier high. Anything else is unlikely to get stopped. Yes, yes, it's sad that we have to go through the gatekeeper, etc. We've hashed that out as well. But I think in the end that tinkerers can win on this machine if they're determined enough, even without jailbreaking.
- orangecat 17y ago
  Apple has already rejected a Commodore 64 emulator because it allowed access to the BASIC interpreter. Web apps are the only alternate execution environment they'll allow.
  - cpr 17y ago
    OK, then someone needs to make a Squeak-like Javascript programming environment, using only the built-in JS machinery. Can't see how they could complain about that.
- Psyonic 17y ago
  You can't develop on the device though; you also need a mac, so it's not the same.
jonknee 17y ago
I'd like to hear Steve Jobs' take on the matter. It's my opinion that this is what he always wanted and if he made the Mac today it would be a walled garden as well. When the phone came out he was called on it and had an absurd BS answer, but one that's no longer applicable: "You don’t want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/01/6597.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/01/6597.ars It would be curious to see what he has to say now. I admire the hell of the guy, but it really seems like he doesn't understand the criticism because to him the iPhone OS is the perfect environment. And as such, why would he let anyone screw it up?
gojomo 17y ago
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. Bad assumptions. Are we sure there won't be an 'XCode' or other dev environment for the iPad? (See also, "YCRFS #5: Development on Handhelds" <http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html>. http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html>.) The MobileSafari browser alone is in many ways a richer programming environment -- with Javascript, Canvas, network and storage facilities -- than my Apple ][+ was with Applesoft Basic / Pascal / S-C Macro Assembler, or anything included in the early days of the Mac. And won't many curious kids jailbreak their iPad? (Did young Al3x ever run pirated software on his 'hackable' machines? Does a bear shit in the woods?) Given its larger format and educational uses, I also expect Apple will eventually loosen the scripting/runtime limits on the iPad (as compared to the iPhone), and possibly even offer an official 'jailbreak' for full access. They've already broken the lock-to-single-carrier and required-service-plans.
andrewljohnson 17y ago
Well, this is the very last iPad article I read. There has not been a single person who has had a useful comment. Either you see the simple computer as some harbinger of the death of the PC, or you are an Apple fanboy who thinks the thing is a magic wand. Guess what everybody. It's neither. The iPad will have zero effect on the computing philosophy of the world. The world is no more open or closed than it used to be. And the iPad is just another (probably great, as usual) gadget from Apple. All of you who are writing these windy pieces about the ramifications of the iPad have just been swept up in a mighty PR storm. Even those decrying the device are just helping Apple.
- ynniv 17y ago
  Seconded. It seems that any constructive discussion around the iPad is ignored or actively thwarted. Everyone seems to want this to be a flame-war when we should really be looking at the implications should the iPad succeed: tight control is what the markets want. But we're months from discovering that.
- DannoHung 17y ago
  Here, I got something for you: I was thinking about it earlier, and I was wondering how I'd get something to print from the iPad, being that there's no normal USB connection. And it hit me in the face: Why would I want to print? If it's something I want to give someone else, I'll send it to them through email. If it's something that I'd want to refer to later, I'd just have my iPad with me later. The iPad kills a lot of the reason for having paper.
  - joubert 17y ago
    I already don't print. (uhm, except once every 2 years when I renew my apt lease).
    - nir 17y ago
      A plane/train/bus/show ticket? An article you want to go over, marking and adding notes (my wife does this sort of thing..) A paper due to be submitted to someone who will mark & write notes and don't want to have to print it themselves? Some reading material for locations where you don't want to take your $500 gadget?
alexqgb 17y ago
Alex Payne seems not to have noticed the price. At $500, he can afford to buy one of these and a 24" iMac for less than the cost on a 13" MacBookPro. Or he buy a Dell, or - really - anything he wants. Then again, perhaps Alex Payne noticed some EULA fine print that says buying one of these forces you to discard every other object you own with a chip inside, and swear absolute allegiance to this ONE thing. I suspect, instead, that Alex Payne is simply being an idiot.
eplanit 17y ago
It's full-circle for Apple...they _never_ liked openness. The new iPad, with all the closed-ness and proprietariness of it isn't shocking by how new it is...but how oddly familiar it is. The Apple I knew (and resisted) from the 1980s to the mid 2000s was decidedly and deliberately closed, and in complete opposition to the open systems and PC world. They might go back to that model, at which point I'll go right back to not using any Apple products. The world will (hopefully) always want open-ness. If Apple won't deliver that, someone else will. I'm less optimistic about consumers. The iPad might indeed be just what 'regular' consumers want....a new kind of fancy TV set. If so, the iPad is just right for them. The dark cloud for me is that parallel. When TV was introduced, people had grand visions of an informed society, brought together by broadcasts of useful and enlightening knowledge. It ended up being an ad-selling jukebox of near-useless crap. We've projected the same (and even larger) hopes and dreams on the new technology...but the trajectory seems all too familiar.
d0m 17y ago
For me, the iPad isn't a computer. It's more of a really cool gadjet which will let me see webpage, play games and watch video in a really cool way. It's a tool I will use when eating and travelling. It seems like people aren't arguing about the right thing. It's like saying the iPhone sucks because you can't use vim, compile or use grep. Or that a microwave sucks because you can't put a big cooking pot inside.
- GeorgeTirebiter 17y ago
  So, you're going to lug and iPad AND your laptop when you travel? Seems like fail to me. (Don't forget the chargers and cables you'll need, too).
nickbw 17y ago
Hey, look, another doom and gloom article about the iPad and the end of open development. Let's just try searching it for some keywords. "web" ... not found "browser" ... not found "safari" ... not found Yes, well. When did native apps become the new vinyl records? "Sure, the web is great and platform independent, but there's just more soul in compiled code."
- dschobel 17y ago
  No one gave a crap about applications on iphone before the app store. I have yet to hear one story written about the mad rush to develop web applications for the iphone. The native app/app store combination is incontrovertibly the best way to deliver applications and have your product found. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous or simply naive.
  - nickbw 17y ago
    No one gave a crap about web apps for the iPhone because they all wanted to develop apps that took advantage of phone features. (Which Apple has been making more and more accessible to web apps anyway.) The entire scare here is that the iPad will make personal computing a closed ecosystem. But the web is already where most people spend most of their computer time, and Safari is an excellent and standards-complient browser. No, you won't develop web apps for the iPad. You'll develop web apps, period. For the web. Which people will use on iPads and any other computer they please. The battle that matters is keeping web standards open. Consumer operating systems can be as closed as they like, as long as they come with a compatible browser.
    - dschobel 17y ago
      I understand why this position is theoretically reassuring as some sort of an open portal onto the device but as a practical matter, web apps will be just as irrelevant on the ipad as they are on the iphone.
      - nickbw 17y ago
philwelch 17y ago
"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." You could say the same about most PC's, actually. Time was, when you got a computer it had a few programs and some sort of interpreter or compiler to build your own program. Kids back then who got computers became programmers. Kids today get computers and go on the internet, and there's enough there to distract you that you don't get bored enough to install a compiler or something. Somehow, kids still get into programming anyway.
chaostheory 17y ago
"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." Laptops and desktops aren't going away. Everyone is blogging like the end of the hacker world is coming. Apple isn't forcing anyone to buy their products. Worse comes to worse you can just build a PC if you don't like the convenience of a great looking prison.
marshallp 17y ago
"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." Programming should be moving to the cloud anyway - heroku,appengine,aws is where the hacker should be innovating - do programming through the web browser you can have kids do simple programming in the webbrowser in javascript
replicatorblog 17y ago
If I had a book of art when I was a kid I wouldn't have learned to paint. If I lived near a 5 star restaurant I would never have learned to cook. If I could watch professional soccer I wouldn't learn to play. There are dozens of closed systems, far harder to crack than the app store that people bulldoze through because they love them Well made products strike chords with people and excite them to the point where they have to make something as nice, or better. If anything I think this will hasten the transition from passive TV watching to interactivity which will spur more hacking.
- mcherm 17y ago
  Let's re-phrase those to keep the analogy a little more accurate: If I hadn't been able to scribble in the margins of my art books, I never would have learned to draw. If all my meals had come pre-packaged and pre-approved by the food board with raw ingredients prohibited, then I would never have learned to cook. If I could watch professional soccer but was prohibited from playing myself except on a regulation field (none of which were near my house) then I wouldn't have learned to play. The existence of closed systems doesn't harm learning. But if the tools we give people are closed systems rather than open ones, that DOES harm learning... folks will learn to work with tools others build but will NOT learn to build it themselves. Which works great for becoming better consumers, but perhaps isn't the best way to create a new generation of inventors and innovators.
sahaj 17y ago
remember this? http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
btucker 17y ago
I don't buy it. We all know the thing'll be jailbroken in short order. If a kid wants to tinker with an iPad I'm sure there will be just as many ResEdit-esque opportunities to hack it.
aantix 17y ago
In an article that outlines how the iPad as doing "little to enable creativity", I'm surprised that he didn't mention the irony of Apple's claim yesterday that it's at "at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts."
elliottkember 17y ago
I keep hoping that escalators will replace stairs, but they never do.
rythie 17y ago
"Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history" Couldn't you have said the same about the games console? Even now I can't program my Wii or any other major console, and that's been consistently true for over 30 years in games consoles. People knew then, just as they know now, if you want to tinker you get a real computer. The difference is, now you'll be able to program for the device your friends use, where as programs I wrote on my PC stayed there and my friends with consoles could never use/play them. (though it would be nice if you could develop from Linux and Windows machines too)
gfodor 17y ago
By the sound of the web today, you'd think Apple pulled the plug on their entire Mac product line and now only sells iPads and iPhones.
jsz0 17y ago
If we want to blame someone for the emergence of walled gardens in technology it should go squarely on the developers of malware, crackers, exploiters, fraudsters, etc. They've made the open computing experience terrible for the average user.
Kevin_Marks 17y ago
Alex's fears remind me of 'real programmers' reactiosn to the Web when it came out. The iPad is the Web made physical. http://epeus.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipad-is-web-made-physical.html http://epeus.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipad-is-web-made-physical....
jrwoodruff 17y ago
The automobile has followed a similar trajectory. Early cars were 'open' in a sense. Ford's Model T came with a small toolkit that contained all the tools needed to repair it. Modern cars barely come with enough tools to change a flat tire, but that hasn't stopped people from modding. Now, in addition to boring out heads or swapping engines, modern street rodders can tweak the fuel-to-air ratio with their laptops and install large-bore fuel injectors. Hacking is something that will always be around. The iPad may - if successful - usher in a new, possibly more mature era of computing, but people are still going to be hacking the new devices. Just because it ain't your daddy's '69 Camaro doesn't mean it can't be modded for the drag strip.
drawkbox 17y ago
Game consoles such as the XBOX, PS3 and now the iPad are always closed to help create a market and for quality of service for the consumer device that they are. The XBOX 360 is a bit more open than the others but I consider the iPad much like a console with a specific purpose. It may just even challenge the XBOX and PS3 as a game console much as the iPhone and iPod Touch have done. I wish they were more open but openness also kills a bit of the market and revenue possibilities. It sucks, but that is just the way it is. Computers and hacker culture will still exist, they can pry that from my cold dead hands. But while I am at it I will make some money in the market that Apple is creating.
jstevens85 17y ago
Palm's Project Ares may be a sign of the future. Perhaps in the future development will be hosted in the cloud rather than on the programmers unit itself. http://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html http://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html
loup-vaillant 17y ago
Trusted Computing. I don't understand why no one coined the term yet. The IPhone, IPod Touch and IPad are computers with some form of Trusted computing. The IPone and IPod Touch weren't a big cause for concern because they weren't seen as fully fledged computers (although technically, they are). The IPad, on the other hand, leaves no doubt. I think few disagree here when I say that Trusted Computing is a scandal, is dangerous, and restricts our liberties. I think no one here would be willing to buy a "Trusted Computing" desktop (except for cracking it). Yet many people here don't see the exact same danger with the IPad. Some even love it. Why? Maybe because the device looks new. Maybe because it is the logical sequel of the IPhone (it feels like being slowly cooked with the proverbial frog). Maybe it is because people feel safe when a big Gatekeeper keeps bad things out. Maybe this is a combination of all those things. Actually, I don't really know. The IPad is Trusted Computing Without A Name. Accepting it is accepting Trusted Computing. Your choice.

143 points by twampss 17y ago

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent with my own. It's pretty odd to me how people have willingly accepted Apple's closed phone and media player ecosystem without batting an eye-lash, but the iPad is just outrageous as it encroaches on the PC. Isn't the iPad just a logical continuation of Apple's trajectory of the last decade?

tlack 17y ago
But I think people understand the limits of a phone that means it might have to be closed (after all, phones were closed for 15 years before we started seeing "open" ones), and people saw the crazy copyright battles that went on that lead to a big restriction in music copying freedom. On the other hand, we've had programmable computers in our homes for 30 years.. we aren't ready to give that up.
- dschobel 17y ago
  I suppose, but from a Stallman-esque strictly engineering point of view, it's all just software running on hardware and the fact that you call one with a 4" display a phone makes everyone accept it being closed but a 10" display crosses the boundary into PC territory and now it's outrageous to be closed. It strikes me as an arbitrary distinction to make.
- ryandvm 17y ago
  Or maybe we are. That's what Jobs/Apple are betting. Apple thinks that people have tired of dealing with anti-virus and task managers and package installers and folders and system updates. Perhaps they're right, there is definitely a segment of the market that just wants a web browser and some rich media. They don't care about multi-tasking or customization. If the iPad takes off, you can bet that locked down versions of OSX won't be far behind. Google is headed in a similar direction with ChromeOS. Apple's vision: "We'll give you an awesome experience, but you're going to pay us a little bit at a time for all of it." Google's vision: "We'll give you an awesome experience for free, but you're going to tell us everything about you."
  - adamc 17y ago
    I find myself in the uncomfortable position of preferring Microsoft's vision.
    - DannoHung 17y ago
      "We'll give you a shitty experience and if we become popular, then you don't get any choice on top of that!"
    - ericd 17y ago
      There's always Linux...
    - tomjen2 17y ago
      I can't say that I necessary disagree, but the thought that my future freedom depend upon Microsoft rubs me the wrong way. But at least I will now have a reason to join the evil empire.
- dschobel 17y ago
  I agree, and I'm not even trying to broach the politics of it being a closed system. I'm just wondering why lots of very tech savvy people have never minded their ipods, cellphones, gaming consoles, etc, etc, etc being closed. Maybe we should have been protesting those all along? Otherwise how do you reconcile accepting all of those but rejecting this device?
  - orangecat 17y ago
    Opportunity cost. The iPhone, and the iPad to an even greater extent, have lots of potential that can't be (easily/legally) utilized because of Apple's control. That's not true of earlier phones, which were too technically limited to do a whole lot even if they were open. It's also not true of consoles which are just locked down PCs; there's not much you could do with a hacked Xbox that you couldn't also do with a Mac mini.
  - tlack 17y ago
    I can only speak for myself, but I rarely want to change the way I work with my phone (well, more so lately, but that's a separate Blackberry rant ;) ), and I wouldn't ever want to change the way my mp3 player would work if I had one. But I almost always want to change the way my computer works, since I interact with it in such a rich way and it provides me all of my money. I want that flexibility to hone my tools, but I don't want the flexibility to hone all of my tools..
joe_the_user 17y ago
I agree that iPad is a culmination of Apple's trajectory of the last decade, maybe Steve Job's trajectory for his career. It's a triumph of creating something entirely designed to meet people immediate needs while not having any rough edges. And extensibility is inherently a rough edge. But that doesn't change from the negative points the article makes - it illuminates them.

tlack 17y ago

Beware, ranty comment follows: There's another possibility here. Microsoft succeeded because of their focus on developers and, to some extent, having an open ecosystem as long as it suited their business goals. Forgetting this may be Apple's first slip up. When OS X came out, tons of amazing apps came out that got many people switching: if Apple turns off those same developers, the platform will weaken.

umtrey 17y ago
People didn't switch to the Mac in droves when XCode came out, or when Apple switched to OS X. It took a closed platform - a perfectly cultured, strictly defined environment that was the iPod to start building the halo (and with that, peoples' trust) towards the desktop/laptop Mac. The iPhone didn't get the buzz or the acclaim because of the App Store - it became thought of as a gift from the heavens! Steve has blessed us with this new way to add our value to the closed product. Watch this happen in a different extent with the iPad - something new will come up that will open it up ever so slightly, adding new features where Apple doesn't have the creative or physical capacity to develop.
- orangecat 17y ago
  It took a closed platform - a perfectly cultured, strictly defined environment that was the iPod to start building the halo (and with that, peoples' trust) towards the desktop/laptop Mac. There are many plausible interpretations of history. Mine is that Mac market share took off around the same time as the ascendancy of laptops, when screens and mobile CPUs got to the point where they were no longer hugely inferior to desktops. Mac laptop sales exploded because they're both more aesthetically appealing (which matters more for laptops since other people see them) and more functional (e.g. sleep and wireless actually work reliably). I also think early alpha geek adoption of OS X helped to a lesser extent, both in terms of the software they created and in recommendations to friends and family. The iPhone/iPad may become like Windows in the 90s: what developers write for during the day to pay the bills, while they do their hacking on platforms that don't frustrate their desires.

joe_the_user 17y ago

I personally feel more optimistic than most commentators concerning what "most people" will want. I think that a large enough group of people will continue to want an extensible machine that closed systems like the ipad will have trouble seeming like a good deal - a Mac or a PC might a bit harder to use but it does have that one extra program you have to use sometimes.

wvenable 17y ago

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history I disagree. We're in a time of change now -- very soon we won't be getting any of media in the same old ways. TV will be replaced with digital streaming. Music, for the younger generation, is already almost entirely digital. It's even becoming perfectly reasonable to read books on digital devices now. However, this digital future is not open to everyone. My parents have a hell of time operating a computer and don't benefit from the latest streaming media technologies. They get their music on CD's. They read books on paper. The general purpose computer has failed them. Why shouldn't Apple fill this gap between the TV and the computer? I'm sure Apple fans will lament the loss of general purpose computing devices from Apple. But it doesn't mean that the hacker era is dead. It just means that most hackers may have to look somewhere else to find a product that suits them.

mdg 17y ago

The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. Upon reading that, I was immediately reminded of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 minus the sledge.

bitwize 17y ago
There was another article linked to here, said something like Apple was now the face on the screen, not the woman with the hammer. I think a lot of us recalled that old commercial...

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butterfi 17y ago

"Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history" Perhaps the microwave signals an end to the chef era of cooking history.

ynniv 17y ago
That might be my favorite iPad analogy yet. Will people please stop calling this the end of computing? If not for me, do it for CoCo [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/23/44346/3789 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/23/44346/3789]
dschobel 17y ago
If you write software for a living you have to write for whichever platform the market dictates.
holygoat 17y ago
In a very real way, it did. Fifty or sixty years ago, people prepared food largely from scratch. Now, a large proportion of the population of Western nations prepares food by poking a hole in the plastic cover, closing the door, and hitting "Express". Similarly, one possible future prompted by the iPad is one where "chefs" (hackers) do food preparation, but most people hit the power button. Al3x is asserting that this is bad because there's not really much of a path from 'here' to 'there'. You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it.
- adriand 17y ago
  > You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it. What if you get started by writing HTML and Javascript code into a nice online editor - something like Bespin, or like those many different sites where you can code in all sorts of languages using a web-based front-end - and you get to publish your results to a web page and see the results immediately? Does it get any easier than that? Code - publish - save to home screen - "hey dad, check out this application I just made!"

swannodette 17y ago

"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." I simply do not buy this. A tinkerer is born a tinkerer. I had a Mac in the late 80s and throughout the 90s and the only way to program the damn thing was to beg my folks to shell a couple hundred bucks for CodeWarrior and another couple hundred bucks for Apple Reference books. The dev tools today for the iPad cost $99, the reference is free with the tools. If I was a father right now and I had a ten year-old-tinkerer I'd buy one, give it to my kid, get them a dev account and say, "Hack the shit out of this thing." EDIT: "A tinkerer is born a tinkerer + some parental encouragement". When my parents (who at the time had little money, father was in the Army) bought our first Apple IIgs, he said "You should learn how to write your own programs for it". I didn't even know what programming was. But this was enough to make me hunt school libraries for books on BASIC.

deleted 17y ago
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- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  I can tell you from experience of having 7 siblings that if you gave them a iPad and gave them the dev tools, they (95% of people) wouldn't bother. But is this really different? Ten years ago, did more than 5% of people feel the need to tinker with their computer under the hood?
- swannodette 17y ago
  I didn't say the problem was the cost of development tools. "can tell you from experience of having 7 siblings that if you gave them a iPad and gave them the dev tools, they (95% of people) wouldn't bother." You can say that about the computer you're typing on. According to what you've just said the end of encouraging a "hacker like mentality" began with arrival of easy to use computers 25 years ago.
prospero 17y ago
The dev tools today for the iPad cost $99, the reference is free with the tools. And how much for the computer which is capable of running those dev tools? The point is that the iPad isn't a device which can be used to modify itself, and if it entirely supplants other computers in a household, your experience becomes completely dictated by what other people have created.

bliss 17y ago

I half agree with the sentiment here, except... This thing is Gaol Bait if I've ever seen it, I give it a week after launch before arbitrary code execution is possible. Voila, now you can write your own software/tweak away till your heart's content. Seems an uncool thing to say, but you know what? I'm waiting in that line! I think it looks great.

morlockhq 17y ago

That's why my kids are growing up with those clunky ugly computers that the Mac loathes running a completely open operating system with every imaginable programming language at their finger tips. It won't be pretty, but neither was the Timex Sinclair 1000 that was the first computer that I programmed with BASIC.

derefr 17y ago

Remember: The iPad has an app store. Until that is no longer true, Apple will always sell a product that runs XCode and targets that app store, and targets its own platform in order to develop new versions of XCode. Further, because Apple doesn't want to deal with people pushing broken "test" updates to their servers, they'll always have a Simulator program. And, even if every other open platform disappears, you'll always be able to tinker inside that simulator. /pragmatic pessimism

CamperBob 17y ago

This is why I say that the iPad is a cynical thing: Apple can’t – or won’t – conceive of a future for personal computing that is both elegant and open, usable and free. Sheesh. It's not a computer. It's an appliance. If you want an open programmable device, they will cheerfully sell you a Mac. The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. And if I had a dishwasher rather than a real computer as a kid, I'd never be a programmer today, either. Oh, wait. The two have nothing to do with each other, except that they both contain microprocessors.

sofal 17y ago
Is it really that hard to picture people using iPads instead of traditional computers?
- CamperBob 17y ago
  If a closed system ends up working better for some people, all I can say is... whose fault is that?

richcollins 17y ago

I see this as a huge opportunity to have even more people try my creations. Many of the people using iPhones and presumably iPads might never had considered using a web app or traditional desktop app.

dannyr 17y ago
I think Alex's main point is that this device is more for people who consume rather than people who create.
- richcollins 17y ago
  Yes and that is a good thing. We'll have our devices for creating as well. It's not taking from us, its adding to everyone else.

jazzychad 17y ago

"...if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." Whoa now. If I were a kid (and a tinkerer) and saw an iPad, I would immediately think, "how can I make something to run on this??" and go off and learn. People still have to write apps for this thing. Just because you cannot actively develop code on it does not mean that it will discourage young tinkerers from learning about programming (for iPad or any other platform). Apple will continue to create "full computers" if for no other reason than for developers to create software for their "closed computers." That endgame would be sad, but we won't witness the death of desktop/laptop computers. If someone is so concerned about teaching programming using the iPad, could one not write a BASIC app or some such? That's how I started learning to program: on a VTech computer when I was a kid... it was basically a 1x20 LCD output screen attached to a keyboard and 8 D-Cell batteries. It was mainly to teach typing and had a few trivia games, but it also had a BASIC mode... a very closed device with a BASIC app, sound familiar? Also, let's not forget about young programmers learning how to do web-based sites/apps. They are not as powerful/fast as native apps, but at least it is a fast/easy/free way to start learning about programming/UI/etc and see it realized on the newest/hottest device. That would be exciting to me as a kid. Webapps are gateway drugs to native apps, trust me. EDIT: found a picture of the old VTech computer - http://rasterweb.net/raster/computers/images/vtech.jpg http://rasterweb.net/raster/computers/images/vtech.jpg

eplanit 17y ago
But Whoa on that 'Whoa'. There's a huge difference: the PC came with vendor and third-party technical reference and programming manuals, BIOS references, etc. It was a world that encouraged that kind of curiosity and creativity. Now, a kid who does that is a "jailbreaker", and can be sued by Apple for DMCA violations, etc. My own personal Apple experience: Age 17, Apple II. Open the covers, look at the circuitry, look at sample programs....a career began. New technologists need as many legal reference books as they do technical reference books. (Listen to the old guy refer to 'books') :-)

cpr 17y ago

Well, let's find out just how true this is. As someone else remarked, if you want to hack, get the dev kit and start hacking (yes, $99/year; think of it as the tinkerer's software upgrade; we've already hashed that out elsewhere on HN). I also think some of us should start submitting things like Squeak ports (with suitable UI upgrades for touch) as educational apps. I'll bet Apple would let 'em through, because they're no threat to the ecosystem. I know there are simple programming languages out there on the App Store (e.g., some calculators allow Fortran-like expressions, etc.), so there's not really a ban on programming environments. In fact, I think the ban in place on scripting language is precisely and exactly to keep Flash off the machine, and I don't blame Apple for wanting to keep that barrier high. Anything else is unlikely to get stopped. Yes, yes, it's sad that we have to go through the gatekeeper, etc. We've hashed that out as well. But I think in the end that tinkerers can win on this machine if they're determined enough, even without jailbreaking.

orangecat 17y ago
Apple has already rejected a Commodore 64 emulator because it allowed access to the BASIC interpreter. Web apps are the only alternate execution environment they'll allow.
- cpr 17y ago
  OK, then someone needs to make a Squeak-like Javascript programming environment, using only the built-in JS machinery. Can't see how they could complain about that.
Psyonic 17y ago
You can't develop on the device though; you also need a mac, so it's not the same.

jonknee 17y ago

I'd like to hear Steve Jobs' take on the matter. It's my opinion that this is what he always wanted and if he made the Mac today it would be a walled garden as well. When the phone came out he was called on it and had an absurd BS answer, but one that's no longer applicable: "You don’t want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/01/6597.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/01/6597.ars It would be curious to see what he has to say now. I admire the hell of the guy, but it really seems like he doesn't understand the criticism because to him the iPhone OS is the perfect environment. And as such, why would he let anyone screw it up?

gojomo 17y ago

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. Bad assumptions. Are we sure there won't be an 'XCode' or other dev environment for the iPad? (See also, "YCRFS #5: Development on Handhelds" <http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html>. http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html>.) The MobileSafari browser alone is in many ways a richer programming environment -- with Javascript, Canvas, network and storage facilities -- than my Apple ][+ was with Applesoft Basic / Pascal / S-C Macro Assembler, or anything included in the early days of the Mac. And won't many curious kids jailbreak their iPad? (Did young Al3x ever run pirated software on his 'hackable' machines? Does a bear shit in the woods?) Given its larger format and educational uses, I also expect Apple will eventually loosen the scripting/runtime limits on the iPad (as compared to the iPhone), and possibly even offer an official 'jailbreak' for full access. They've already broken the lock-to-single-carrier and required-service-plans.

andrewljohnson 17y ago

Well, this is the very last iPad article I read. There has not been a single person who has had a useful comment. Either you see the simple computer as some harbinger of the death of the PC, or you are an Apple fanboy who thinks the thing is a magic wand. Guess what everybody. It's neither. The iPad will have zero effect on the computing philosophy of the world. The world is no more open or closed than it used to be. And the iPad is just another (probably great, as usual) gadget from Apple. All of you who are writing these windy pieces about the ramifications of the iPad have just been swept up in a mighty PR storm. Even those decrying the device are just helping Apple.

ynniv 17y ago
Seconded. It seems that any constructive discussion around the iPad is ignored or actively thwarted. Everyone seems to want this to be a flame-war when we should really be looking at the implications should the iPad succeed: tight control is what the markets want. But we're months from discovering that.
DannoHung 17y ago
Here, I got something for you: I was thinking about it earlier, and I was wondering how I'd get something to print from the iPad, being that there's no normal USB connection. And it hit me in the face: Why would I want to print? If it's something I want to give someone else, I'll send it to them through email. If it's something that I'd want to refer to later, I'd just have my iPad with me later. The iPad kills a lot of the reason for having paper.
- joubert 17y ago
  I already don't print. (uhm, except once every 2 years when I renew my apt lease).
  - nir 17y ago
    A plane/train/bus/show ticket? An article you want to go over, marking and adding notes (my wife does this sort of thing..) A paper due to be submitted to someone who will mark & write notes and don't want to have to print it themselves? Some reading material for locations where you don't want to take your $500 gadget?

alexqgb 17y ago

Alex Payne seems not to have noticed the price. At $500, he can afford to buy one of these and a 24" iMac for less than the cost on a 13" MacBookPro. Or he buy a Dell, or - really - anything he wants. Then again, perhaps Alex Payne noticed some EULA fine print that says buying one of these forces you to discard every other object you own with a chip inside, and swear absolute allegiance to this ONE thing. I suspect, instead, that Alex Payne is simply being an idiot.

eplanit 17y ago

It's full-circle for Apple...they _never_ liked openness. The new iPad, with all the closed-ness and proprietariness of it isn't shocking by how new it is...but how oddly familiar it is. The Apple I knew (and resisted) from the 1980s to the mid 2000s was decidedly and deliberately closed, and in complete opposition to the open systems and PC world. They might go back to that model, at which point I'll go right back to not using any Apple products. The world will (hopefully) always want open-ness. If Apple won't deliver that, someone else will. I'm less optimistic about consumers. The iPad might indeed be just what 'regular' consumers want....a new kind of fancy TV set. If so, the iPad is just right for them. The dark cloud for me is that parallel. When TV was introduced, people had grand visions of an informed society, brought together by broadcasts of useful and enlightening knowledge. It ended up being an ad-selling jukebox of near-useless crap. We've projected the same (and even larger) hopes and dreams on the new technology...but the trajectory seems all too familiar.

d0m 17y ago

For me, the iPad isn't a computer. It's more of a really cool gadjet which will let me see webpage, play games and watch video in a really cool way. It's a tool I will use when eating and travelling. It seems like people aren't arguing about the right thing. It's like saying the iPhone sucks because you can't use vim, compile or use grep. Or that a microwave sucks because you can't put a big cooking pot inside.

GeorgeTirebiter 17y ago
So, you're going to lug and iPad AND your laptop when you travel? Seems like fail to me. (Don't forget the chargers and cables you'll need, too).

nickbw 17y ago

Hey, look, another doom and gloom article about the iPad and the end of open development. Let's just try searching it for some keywords. "web" ... not found "browser" ... not found "safari" ... not found Yes, well. When did native apps become the new vinyl records? "Sure, the web is great and platform independent, but there's just more soul in compiled code."

dschobel 17y ago
No one gave a crap about applications on iphone before the app store. I have yet to hear one story written about the mad rush to develop web applications for the iphone. The native app/app store combination is incontrovertibly the best way to deliver applications and have your product found. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous or simply naive.
- nickbw 17y ago
  No one gave a crap about web apps for the iPhone because they all wanted to develop apps that took advantage of phone features. (Which Apple has been making more and more accessible to web apps anyway.) The entire scare here is that the iPad will make personal computing a closed ecosystem. But the web is already where most people spend most of their computer time, and Safari is an excellent and standards-complient browser. No, you won't develop web apps for the iPad. You'll develop web apps, period. For the web. Which people will use on iPads and any other computer they please. The battle that matters is keeping web standards open. Consumer operating systems can be as closed as they like, as long as they come with a compatible browser.
  - dschobel 17y ago
    I understand why this position is theoretically reassuring as some sort of an open portal onto the device but as a practical matter, web apps will be just as irrelevant on the ipad as they are on the iphone.
    - nickbw 17y ago

philwelch 17y ago

"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." You could say the same about most PC's, actually. Time was, when you got a computer it had a few programs and some sort of interpreter or compiler to build your own program. Kids back then who got computers became programmers. Kids today get computers and go on the internet, and there's enough there to distract you that you don't get bored enough to install a compiler or something. Somehow, kids still get into programming anyway.

chaostheory 17y ago

"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." Laptops and desktops aren't going away. Everyone is blogging like the end of the hacker world is coming. Apple isn't forcing anyone to buy their products. Worse comes to worse you can just build a PC if you don't like the convenience of a great looking prison.

marshallp 17y ago

"The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today." Programming should be moving to the cloud anyway - heroku,appengine,aws is where the hacker should be innovating - do programming through the web browser you can have kids do simple programming in the webbrowser in javascript

replicatorblog 17y ago

If I had a book of art when I was a kid I wouldn't have learned to paint. If I lived near a 5 star restaurant I would never have learned to cook. If I could watch professional soccer I wouldn't learn to play. There are dozens of closed systems, far harder to crack than the app store that people bulldoze through because they love them Well made products strike chords with people and excite them to the point where they have to make something as nice, or better. If anything I think this will hasten the transition from passive TV watching to interactivity which will spur more hacking.

mcherm 17y ago
Let's re-phrase those to keep the analogy a little more accurate: If I hadn't been able to scribble in the margins of my art books, I never would have learned to draw. If all my meals had come pre-packaged and pre-approved by the food board with raw ingredients prohibited, then I would never have learned to cook. If I could watch professional soccer but was prohibited from playing myself except on a regulation field (none of which were near my house) then I wouldn't have learned to play. The existence of closed systems doesn't harm learning. But if the tools we give people are closed systems rather than open ones, that DOES harm learning... folks will learn to work with tools others build but will NOT learn to build it themselves. Which works great for becoming better consumers, but perhaps isn't the best way to create a new generation of inventors and innovators.

sahaj 17y ago

remember this? http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

btucker 17y ago

I don't buy it. We all know the thing'll be jailbroken in short order. If a kid wants to tinker with an iPad I'm sure there will be just as many ResEdit-esque opportunities to hack it.

aantix 17y ago

In an article that outlines how the iPad as doing "little to enable creativity", I'm surprised that he didn't mention the irony of Apple's claim yesterday that it's at "at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts."

elliottkember 17y ago

I keep hoping that escalators will replace stairs, but they never do.

rythie 17y ago

"Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the hacker era of digital history" Couldn't you have said the same about the games console? Even now I can't program my Wii or any other major console, and that's been consistently true for over 30 years in games consoles. People knew then, just as they know now, if you want to tinker you get a real computer. The difference is, now you'll be able to program for the device your friends use, where as programs I wrote on my PC stayed there and my friends with consoles could never use/play them. (though it would be nice if you could develop from Linux and Windows machines too)

gfodor 17y ago

By the sound of the web today, you'd think Apple pulled the plug on their entire Mac product line and now only sells iPads and iPhones.

jsz0 17y ago

If we want to blame someone for the emergence of walled gardens in technology it should go squarely on the developers of malware, crackers, exploiters, fraudsters, etc. They've made the open computing experience terrible for the average user.

Kevin_Marks 17y ago

Alex's fears remind me of 'real programmers' reactiosn to the Web when it came out. The iPad is the Web made physical. http://epeus.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipad-is-web-made-physical.html http://epeus.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipad-is-web-made-physical....

jrwoodruff 17y ago

The automobile has followed a similar trajectory. Early cars were 'open' in a sense. Ford's Model T came with a small toolkit that contained all the tools needed to repair it. Modern cars barely come with enough tools to change a flat tire, but that hasn't stopped people from modding. Now, in addition to boring out heads or swapping engines, modern street rodders can tweak the fuel-to-air ratio with their laptops and install large-bore fuel injectors. Hacking is something that will always be around. The iPad may - if successful - usher in a new, possibly more mature era of computing, but people are still going to be hacking the new devices. Just because it ain't your daddy's '69 Camaro doesn't mean it can't be modded for the drag strip.

drawkbox 17y ago

Game consoles such as the XBOX, PS3 and now the iPad are always closed to help create a market and for quality of service for the consumer device that they are. The XBOX 360 is a bit more open than the others but I consider the iPad much like a console with a specific purpose. It may just even challenge the XBOX and PS3 as a game console much as the iPhone and iPod Touch have done. I wish they were more open but openness also kills a bit of the market and revenue possibilities. It sucks, but that is just the way it is. Computers and hacker culture will still exist, they can pry that from my cold dead hands. But while I am at it I will make some money in the market that Apple is creating.

jstevens85 17y ago

Palm's Project Ares may be a sign of the future. Perhaps in the future development will be hosted in the cloud rather than on the programmers unit itself. http://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html http://ares.palm.com/Ares/about.html

loup-vaillant 17y ago

Trusted Computing. I don't understand why no one coined the term yet. The IPhone, IPod Touch and IPad are computers with some form of Trusted computing. The IPone and IPod Touch weren't a big cause for concern because they weren't seen as fully fledged computers (although technically, they are). The IPad, on the other hand, leaves no doubt. I think few disagree here when I say that Trusted Computing is a scandal, is dangerous, and restricts our liberties. I think no one here would be willing to buy a "Trusted Computing" desktop (except for cracking it). Yet many people here don't see the exact same danger with the IPad. Some even love it. Why? Maybe because the device looks new. Maybe because it is the logical sequel of the IPhone (it feels like being slowly cooked with the proverbial frog). Maybe it is because people feel safe when a big Gatekeeper keeps bad things out. Maybe this is a combination of all those things. Actually, I don't really know. The IPad is Trusted Computing Without A Name. Accepting it is accepting Trusted Computing. Your choice.