9 ms·

IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

144 points by sumeeta 17y ago

stcredzero 17y ago
Some sort of hacking sandbox is needed for the iPad. Something like Hypercard would be dandy. Then again, aren't web apps already available? Safari is a very good Javascript platform. Maybe an iPad version of iWeb with a "local server" and some sort of app publishing/sharing via Mobile Me? Actually the beauty of this approach, is that a 3rd party could come out with this quickly, using App Engine or Amazon as a back end. Combine that with an iPad App that opens a special purpose browser/Ide to run them in, and I think you'd have a business.
- gte910h 17y ago
  Apple expressly forbids "interpreted code" on the iPhoneOS platform. I will say, on Monday that Adobe is releasing flash CS5 which will build native Android/iPhone/iPad/Desktop/Web apps all from the same source (which will be compiled down, not interpreted). I for one would love for this to be the new hypercard :OD http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ http://cs5launch.adobe.com/
  - tumult 17y ago
    No, they don't. Stop repeating this lie. They reject App Store applications which allow users to load in external code which is executed.
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    - gte910h 17y ago
      You're wrong. Read section 3.3.2 of http://www.eff.org/files/20100302_iphone_dev_agr.pdf 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.
      - whyenot 17y ago
        Corona SDK http://anscamobile.com/corona/ http://anscamobile.com/corona/ is Lua underneath, and has been used by quite a few (at least 20) approved iPhone apps.
        Zak 17y ago
        I think you can have an interpreter underneath, as long as it can't obtain code that isn't shipped with the app.
        gte910h 17y ago
        And Apple never changes position on anything and removes things from the store retroactively. Oh wait they do that all the time. The way the agreement is written it expressly forbids interpreters. Additionally, corona is mostly compiled (although parts are still in an intermediate format see 16:30 in http://www.mobileorchard.com/corona-easy-to-implement-high-performance-native-iphone-apps-written-in-lua/ http://www.mobileorchard.com/corona-easy-to-implement-high-p...)
        whyenot 17y ago
        The lua parts of corona are compiled to bytecodes, but they still run on a lua vm on the iphone. As far as Apple changing their minds, the last 24 hours have proven you right.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        > So hypercard is out of the running. Unless you reimplement it in JavaScript
      - CamperBob 17y ago
  - blasdel 17y ago
    No, they expressly forbid you from implementing your own interpreter or running unsigned machine code. They're just fine with you using their extremely performant javascript implementation.
- bad_user 17y ago
  Personally I'm getting tired of hearing about how Javascript-enabled web apps are good enough. No, they aren't. Yeah, it's exciting that Quake2 runs in Chrome/Safari, it really is. But in 95/96 I was participating in demo-scenes, with graphics that weren't accelerated by the GPU, in 386 real-mode, and it was a lot easier and a lot more exciting (demos that got distributed by a local PC magazine, having as target more people than the people that actually tried that HTML5 Quake2 demo). So welcome to 1997.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    But of course those demos were very limited in scope, because the development techniques used to create them were impossible to scale up.
    - gloob 17y ago
      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 from doing anything particularly low-level - if you were desperate enough, you could always set up a web interface to gcc or something, but that won't help you if you want to hack on a device driver or something. Systems programmers are people too, you know. ;)
      - stcredzero 17y ago
        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?
      - jrockway 17y ago
rms 17y ago
Single page: http://www.slate.com/id/2249872/pagenum/all/ http://www.slate.com/id/2249872/pagenum/all/
plinkplonk 17y ago
"Wozniak's design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine. Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products, Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak's machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add features. There were slots to accommodate all sorts of peripheral devices, and it was built to run a variety of software. Wozniak's ethic of openness also extended to disclosing design specifications. In a 2006 talk at Columbia University, he put the point this way: "Everything we knew, you knew." To point out that this is no longer Apple's policy is to state the obvious." I suspect the resurrection of this vision is what will begin the fightback against Apple's closed universe vision. If I could get the same (or better) hardware, with roughly the same formfactor as the IPad with a lot of connectors and a completely hackable software stack for a decent price, that would be awesome. The only competition shaping up on the hardware front seems to be HP's slate. Maybe I should buy one and install Linux (or something else) on it when it comes out. (If I am wrong correct me, what is a good tablet that competes with the IPad?) I would love to see something built around an ARM processor for e.g. but building hardware is a lot tougher than in Woz's days. As a thought experiment if just the hardware part of the IPod were available for say 350 $ or so it wasn't closed and were completely open like the original Apple so we could hack whatever on it, how many of us would buy one? I would. If i had the harware chops i'd build and sell this myself. Linux is awesome but there isn't a competing (with the IPad) hardware platform to run it on. Hopefully some one will have the cojones and talent to go up against Apple soon. Remember, once Microsoft was the unstoppable juggernaut who were on track to dominate all of computing. I hope to live to see the day of the withering of Apple.
- philips 17y ago
  Always Innovating's Touch Book is probably close to what you want. The hardware specs are open, there are pins for serial on the board, and it can run a variety of ARM based Linux distros (Android, Ubuntu, etc).: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ Plus the disassembly instructions are provided by the manufacturer: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Top_part http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Top_part
stretchwithme 17y ago
tis the nature of many products in an evolving economy to grow more capable, complex inside, more simple to use and more taken for granted. the iPad is just one more of those things and the Woz stood in line eagerly to get his.
Sapslzr 17y ago
more like Steve Jobs final step into the dark side
samd 17y ago
I 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."
- jsz0 17y ago
  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.
- joezydeco 17y ago
  But all of those were things that were left out of the Apple ][ project for various reasons: either they didn't exist yet (Disk ][ being the prime example), or were too expensive to add to the motherboard. What exactly is lacking from modern hardware today? Not enough communications capability? Screen isn't large or hi-res enough? The expandability has moved to software. That's the App Store. People are customizing their machines and adding capability, but they're doing it through the SDK and not the schematics.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Any restrictions on modern hardware are likely to be strategic. For instance, the reason you can't make voice calls with the ipad and that it doesn't have a camera is most likely because that would mean you no longer need an iphone. The parts would have added another $5 to the total cost, if that. It also gives them a reason to sell you a new one a year or two down the line. Along with less anemic ram, needed for this amazing new feature called multi-tasking.
thought_alarm 17y ago
It's funny how so many people are suddenly mischaracterizing the Apple II or the nature of early personal computers. The very first personal computers, like the Apple II, were sold as development kits to developers/hobbyists because these were the only people who would even think to buy a personal computer in 1976 and 1977. These development kits contain all of the information one would need to create software and hardware for these machines. Is that so unusual? Fast forward one short year to 1978 and Apple hires Jef Raskin to start the "McIntosh" project. His goal is to create a $500 computing appliance that the average person could own and use. Sound familiar? Fast forward 32 years. There is more information published about the internals of Linux, Windows, OS X, and PC architecture than most developers would ever want to know. We can write low-level drivers that run in the kernel, to high-level scripting languages. We can design a custom hardware card to slap in a PC or MacPro; we can design custom hardware that connects to an iPhone or a laptop via USB. And the iPad is arguably the closest we've come to Jef Raskin's 1978 vision of a computing appliance.
- gojomo 17y ago
  Also: you can't be a successful technology company, across many decades/scales/markets, running the exact same strategy. The terrain changes too fast. Indeed, it it the overwhelming triumph of openness in many spheres -- the cheap standard components, open-source operating systems, open protocols -- which means other 'sealed appliance' strategies need to be tried, to explore those areas not ideally served by total openness. The sealed iPhone/iPod isn't a rival to openness, but a necessary complement and outgrowth. Just look at the Settings > General > About > Legal page. You'll see 20+ pages of mostly open-source license/copyright declarations.
- whyenot 17y ago
  The very first personal computers, like the Apple II, were sold as development kits to developers/hobbyists because these were the only people who would even think to buy a personal computer in 1976 and 1977. These development kits contain all of the information one would need to create software and hardware for these machines. Is that so unusual? Although I was very young, and it was a log time ago, I'm not sure I agree with you. My dad purchased an S-100 bus system from George Morrow's Thinker Toys in 1977. It came with CP/M, there were games, including Star Trek and Adventure, there was even a word processor of some kind (not WordStar, something else). It certainly wasn't used as a "development kit" -- outside of maybe knowing a little BASIC, my dad didn't know how to program and used the computer for writing letters, and for playing games (which drove my mother nuts :))
_delirium 17y ago
By 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 marks Woz's personal influence in Apple effectively coming to an end. It's not as if this is a recent idea Apple's had. If anything, OSX's relative openness was the aberration, given their history. Despite how exciting we find the Apple II era, I tend to think of the Mac as a bigger part of their history, certainly in terms of the Mac era's influence on today's company.
- orangecat 17y ago
  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.
  - ynniv 17y ago
    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 http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.txt ].
david927 17y ago
Woz 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. Or you can trust a benevolent dictator to work it out for you. Most Apple afficianados will say the most people don't want that freedom; I'm here to tell you that they do. We don't have to debate. Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month, after the faithful have all bought theirs. Woz will win. Woz always wins.
- jsz0 17y ago
  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.
  - copenja 17y ago
    Relax. Neither open or closed equals total domination.
  - eru 17y ago
    What about the original game boy? And numerous other devices.
- houseabsolute 17y ago
  > Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month We already watched the sales of the iPhone, and we saw how that went. Same type of device, same type of complaints by openness advocate, and what was the result? Are you guys going to just keep on saying this stuff until some closed Apple product fails, then say that's proof that people want openness, ignoring the litany of preceding closed devices that succeeded? I'm here to tell you that this is not a very good argument.
baguasquirrel 17y ago
I get this same vibe from a lot of older folks (or people who want to sound like them, all grizzled and what). True, from a hardware standpoint, Apple devices are closed. What matters today however, is that they are open devices from the perspective of a platform and web software developer. Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone? And lets not forget that we make stuff for normal people here. Not just hackers like us. As it turns out, most folks don't want a hardware-hackable machine. They don't care enough for USB ports. The tablets being championed by MSFT in the previous decade were not much more moddable than the iPad, but I don't see anyone yelling at MSFT about that.
- wmf 17y ago
  Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone? I must have forgotten that because it isn't true. On my P800 or Blackberry I could install any app, not just approved ones. (Edit: I wonder if this meme about the "cell phone dark ages" comes from the millions of people who switched from dumbphones to iPhone and thus aren't personally familiar with the actual smartphone state of the art circa 2006.)
  - drenei 17y ago
    I can't speak for where you are, but here in North America (well Canada & the USA) to go from [cell phone customized for service provider] to [cell phone customized for you with apps that you selected to use] was never a simple process - perhaps easier on a blackberry but not simple. The device makers simply didn't have enough leverage to make the process simple.
    - wmf 17y ago
      I am in the USA and IIRC there was no "process" with my T-Mobile Blackberry; I could install any app I wanted directly from the Web browser. Maybe that's some kind of exception since T-Mobile is the least evil carrier.
  - fhars 17y ago
    Smarphones have always been horrible. Have you ever tried to install a JavaME app that does something more useful than storing a high score on a phone? Or dealt with this symbian signing nonsense more than a year or so ago (they made it slightly better with the signing web service since then, but it is still a hassle)? You always have to cope with some certificate authority protection racket, apart from the interresting APIs. The openneess if the iPhone appstore is par for the course here...
nkassis 17y ago
After reading this book about Commodore: http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-Commodore/dp/0973864907/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270671408&sr=1-3 http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-Commodore/d... and a few other good accounts of the period, it really annoys me that Apple get the credit for inventing the personal computer. They were not even the most popular personal computer of the 80s (or 70s). I have a hard time finding anyone who own a Apple II but most of the people I work with were Commodore 64 owners.
- stan_rogers 17y ago
  The winners get to write the history -- and in the end, more people had more to do with Pagemaker, Illustrator and Photoshop (which were, in practical terms, Mac apps) than they did with the far-more-spectacular (for the time) Video Toaster and Caligari (Amiga). It's never been the machine; it's what people can do with it. If prosumer video was more accessible and lit more imaginations at the time, we'd be singing a different song today.
rbanffy 17y ago
> 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.
- Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago
  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.
  - jcl 17y ago
    Apparently it was not homebrew; here are a couple articles saying that he rented the equipment from the phone company. So the dial-a-joke thing might have been entirely legit. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz.html http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/07.html http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/07.html I'm guessing that when the article describes the dial-a-joke service as illegal, it's confusing it with his blue-box antics, which occurred around the same time. According to the following article (a fun read), the blue box preceded dial-a-joke; he got the inspiration for the service from a dial-a-joke line in New York that he called while demoing blue boxes to potential customers: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_microcomputing.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_mi...
dkersten 17y ago
It 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.
- hammerdr 17y ago
  iPhone, smartphone and iPad gaming isn't going to be what console or PC gamers are going to expect. However, we're not talking about those type of people buying this device. For example, Brickbreaker has been played by over 50 million people while COD: Modern Warfare 2 has only been played by 15 million. These type of games (that hardcore gamers would consider silly and frivolous) are going to be the dominant games in the marketplace.
neilk 17y ago
This article is basically fluff. It is trying to turn Apple's evolving business strategies into some sort of personality conflict. One that guys like Woz probably wouldn't acknowledge is real. From the moment they were selling real products and not kits, Apple has always wanted to control every aspect of the computing experience. For a while, at Apple, it was considered heresy to be an "Open Mac" supporter -- that is, you thought it was okay to allow third party companies to produce peripherals like disk drives or printers. It was only around '87 or so that the idea of an expandable Mac saw the light of day (the Macintosh II) and that product line slowly petered out in the 90s. People on this thread are suggesting that the OS was hackable with a floppy disk out of some desire to be friendly to tinkerers. Don't be silly. It was that way because there was no other conceivable alternative for software distribution. If we disregard Apple's mid-90s confusions it's been on a steady road towards the iPad since the beginning, in rhetoric if not always in reality.
wrs 17y ago
While the idea of Jobs vs. Woz philosophies seems basically accurate, they diverged a bit later than the author says. Apple had no control over the software and hardware used with the original Macintosh. The author is just flat wrong on this. The serial connectors were a bit weird for the time, but that was it. There was none of the patented-connector, crypto-signed-applications, brick-the-hacked-devices tactics we see with the i* line. The Mac OS didn't even have kernel mode. You could just rewrite all of RAM with your own code and jump to address zero if you felt like it, and people did. The Apple //c was as "closed" as the Macintosh, and I'm pretty sure Woz had something to do with that machine (you could even get a signed limited edition). Modern Macs are made with plenty of standard parts, and the worst that happens if you mess with them is that you void the warranty--which is exactly what happens if you mess with the insides of a Dell or HP computer. The true divergence is that Jobs now has Apple producing consumer entertainment devices in addition to computers. Obviously, the tradeoffs and rules are different for consumer entertainment devices. Whether it's an iPhone, a PS3, or the radio in my car, the manufacturer isn't interested in supporting openness and arbitrary hacking--they are expected to make a functional, attractive product that "just works", which requires maintaining some control over what goes into it. P.S. AT&T Wireless is the result of AT&T absorbing McCaw Cellular, and separated again from AT&T years ago, so while it's fun to talk about the irony of Jobs' blue-boxing, that wasn't really quite the same company.
CamperBob 17y ago
Hmm, I'm beginning to see why they used an Apple ][+ in LOST. Jobs as the Man in Black, against Woz's Jacob. ("You have no idea how much I want to kill you.")
jacquesm 17y ago
There are multiple 'axis' to this victory business, and this one - the money angle - is only a single way of interpreting all this. If I could choose between the two of them as human beings I'd pick Wozniak for sure, he's one of the nicest 'well to do' people that ever came out of silicon valley. Jobs is simply still in a pissing match with Gates, and it looks like he will be able to prove some day that Apples view of the software market was even more closed than Microsofts, and potentially far more profitable. I bought a Mac for my son a couple of years ago, I'm beginning to regret that decision. At the time it was to open his eyes to the fact that not every computer on the planet runs the same operating system and that diversity is good. Now I'm not so sure that an Apple was the right way to express that (he already had an older linux computer to play with blender on, but it was definitely past its prime). Money is a very convenient yardstick to measure success by, but it collapses a lot of data in to a single number and it does not tell you the history of how it got there. Clearly 'open' is never going to make as much money as 'closed', the RIAA and MPAA are all too aware of that, but longer term 'open' will always win because stuff that is special today is a commodity tomorrow. Remember the times when each and every piece of electronics came with it's own weird set of proprietary protocols and connectors? Now it's all IP and we're better off because of that, except for the lawyers.

144 points by sumeeta 17y ago

Some sort of hacking sandbox is needed for the iPad. Something like Hypercard would be dandy. Then again, aren't web apps already available? Safari is a very good Javascript platform. Maybe an iPad version of iWeb with a "local server" and some sort of app publishing/sharing via Mobile Me? Actually the beauty of this approach, is that a 3rd party could come out with this quickly, using App Engine or Amazon as a back end. Combine that with an iPad App that opens a special purpose browser/Ide to run them in, and I think you'd have a business.

gte910h 17y ago
Apple expressly forbids "interpreted code" on the iPhoneOS platform. I will say, on Monday that Adobe is releasing flash CS5 which will build native Android/iPhone/iPad/Desktop/Web apps all from the same source (which will be compiled down, not interpreted). I for one would love for this to be the new hypercard :OD http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ http://cs5launch.adobe.com/
- tumult 17y ago
  No, they don't. Stop repeating this lie. They reject App Store applications which allow users to load in external code which is executed.
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  - gte910h 17y ago
    You're wrong. Read section 3.3.2 of http://www.eff.org/files/20100302_iphone_dev_agr.pdf 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.
    - whyenot 17y ago
      Corona SDK http://anscamobile.com/corona/ http://anscamobile.com/corona/ is Lua underneath, and has been used by quite a few (at least 20) approved iPhone apps.
      - Zak 17y ago
        I think you can have an interpreter underneath, as long as it can't obtain code that isn't shipped with the app.
      - gte910h 17y ago
        And Apple never changes position on anything and removes things from the store retroactively. Oh wait they do that all the time. The way the agreement is written it expressly forbids interpreters. Additionally, corona is mostly compiled (although parts are still in an intermediate format see 16:30 in http://www.mobileorchard.com/corona-easy-to-implement-high-performance-native-iphone-apps-written-in-lua/ http://www.mobileorchard.com/corona-easy-to-implement-high-p...)
        whyenot 17y ago
        The lua parts of corona are compiled to bytecodes, but they still run on a lua vm on the iphone. As far as Apple changing their minds, the last 24 hours have proven you right.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      > So hypercard is out of the running. Unless you reimplement it in JavaScript
    - CamperBob 17y ago
- blasdel 17y ago
  No, they expressly forbid you from implementing your own interpreter or running unsigned machine code. They're just fine with you using their extremely performant javascript implementation.
bad_user 17y ago
Personally I'm getting tired of hearing about how Javascript-enabled web apps are good enough. No, they aren't. Yeah, it's exciting that Quake2 runs in Chrome/Safari, it really is. But in 95/96 I was participating in demo-scenes, with graphics that weren't accelerated by the GPU, in 386 real-mode, and it was a lot easier and a lot more exciting (demos that got distributed by a local PC magazine, having as target more people than the people that actually tried that HTML5 Quake2 demo). So welcome to 1997.
- jrockway 17y ago
  But of course those demos were very limited in scope, because the development techniques used to create them were impossible to scale up.
  - gloob 17y ago
    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 from doing anything particularly low-level - if you were desperate enough, you could always set up a web interface to gcc or something, but that won't help you if you want to hack on a device driver or something. Systems programmers are people too, you know. ;)
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      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?
    - jrockway 17y ago

rms 17y ago

Single page: http://www.slate.com/id/2249872/pagenum/all/ http://www.slate.com/id/2249872/pagenum/all/

plinkplonk 17y ago

"Wozniak's design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine. Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products, Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak's machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add features. There were slots to accommodate all sorts of peripheral devices, and it was built to run a variety of software. Wozniak's ethic of openness also extended to disclosing design specifications. In a 2006 talk at Columbia University, he put the point this way: "Everything we knew, you knew." To point out that this is no longer Apple's policy is to state the obvious." I suspect the resurrection of this vision is what will begin the fightback against Apple's closed universe vision. If I could get the same (or better) hardware, with roughly the same formfactor as the IPad with a lot of connectors and a completely hackable software stack for a decent price, that would be awesome. The only competition shaping up on the hardware front seems to be HP's slate. Maybe I should buy one and install Linux (or something else) on it when it comes out. (If I am wrong correct me, what is a good tablet that competes with the IPad?) I would love to see something built around an ARM processor for e.g. but building hardware is a lot tougher than in Woz's days. As a thought experiment if just the hardware part of the IPod were available for say 350 $ or so it wasn't closed and were completely open like the original Apple so we could hack whatever on it, how many of us would buy one? I would. If i had the harware chops i'd build and sell this myself. Linux is awesome but there isn't a competing (with the IPad) hardware platform to run it on. Hopefully some one will have the cojones and talent to go up against Apple soon. Remember, once Microsoft was the unstoppable juggernaut who were on track to dominate all of computing. I hope to live to see the day of the withering of Apple.

philips 17y ago
Always Innovating's Touch Book is probably close to what you want. The hardware specs are open, there are pins for serial on the board, and it can run a variety of ARM based Linux distros (Android, Ubuntu, etc).: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ Plus the disassembly instructions are provided by the manufacturer: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Top_part http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Top_part

stretchwithme 17y ago

tis the nature of many products in an evolving economy to grow more capable, complex inside, more simple to use and more taken for granted. the iPad is just one more of those things and the Woz stood in line eagerly to get his.

Sapslzr 17y ago

more like Steve Jobs final step into the dark side

samd 17y ago

I 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."

jsz0 17y ago
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.
joezydeco 17y ago
But all of those were things that were left out of the Apple ][ project for various reasons: either they didn't exist yet (Disk ][ being the prime example), or were too expensive to add to the motherboard. What exactly is lacking from modern hardware today? Not enough communications capability? Screen isn't large or hi-res enough? The expandability has moved to software. That's the App Store. People are customizing their machines and adding capability, but they're doing it through the SDK and not the schematics.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Any restrictions on modern hardware are likely to be strategic. For instance, the reason you can't make voice calls with the ipad and that it doesn't have a camera is most likely because that would mean you no longer need an iphone. The parts would have added another $5 to the total cost, if that. It also gives them a reason to sell you a new one a year or two down the line. Along with less anemic ram, needed for this amazing new feature called multi-tasking.

thought_alarm 17y ago

It's funny how so many people are suddenly mischaracterizing the Apple II or the nature of early personal computers. The very first personal computers, like the Apple II, were sold as development kits to developers/hobbyists because these were the only people who would even think to buy a personal computer in 1976 and 1977. These development kits contain all of the information one would need to create software and hardware for these machines. Is that so unusual? Fast forward one short year to 1978 and Apple hires Jef Raskin to start the "McIntosh" project. His goal is to create a $500 computing appliance that the average person could own and use. Sound familiar? Fast forward 32 years. There is more information published about the internals of Linux, Windows, OS X, and PC architecture than most developers would ever want to know. We can write low-level drivers that run in the kernel, to high-level scripting languages. We can design a custom hardware card to slap in a PC or MacPro; we can design custom hardware that connects to an iPhone or a laptop via USB. And the iPad is arguably the closest we've come to Jef Raskin's 1978 vision of a computing appliance.

gojomo 17y ago
Also: you can't be a successful technology company, across many decades/scales/markets, running the exact same strategy. The terrain changes too fast. Indeed, it it the overwhelming triumph of openness in many spheres -- the cheap standard components, open-source operating systems, open protocols -- which means other 'sealed appliance' strategies need to be tried, to explore those areas not ideally served by total openness. The sealed iPhone/iPod isn't a rival to openness, but a necessary complement and outgrowth. Just look at the Settings > General > About > Legal page. You'll see 20+ pages of mostly open-source license/copyright declarations.
whyenot 17y ago
The very first personal computers, like the Apple II, were sold as development kits to developers/hobbyists because these were the only people who would even think to buy a personal computer in 1976 and 1977. These development kits contain all of the information one would need to create software and hardware for these machines. Is that so unusual? Although I was very young, and it was a log time ago, I'm not sure I agree with you. My dad purchased an S-100 bus system from George Morrow's Thinker Toys in 1977. It came with CP/M, there were games, including Star Trek and Adventure, there was even a word processor of some kind (not WordStar, something else). It certainly wasn't used as a "development kit" -- outside of maybe knowing a little BASIC, my dad didn't know how to program and used the computer for writing letters, and for playing games (which drove my mother nuts :))

_delirium 17y ago

By 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 marks Woz's personal influence in Apple effectively coming to an end. It's not as if this is a recent idea Apple's had. If anything, OSX's relative openness was the aberration, given their history. Despite how exciting we find the Apple II era, I tend to think of the Mac as a bigger part of their history, certainly in terms of the Mac era's influence on today's company.

orangecat 17y ago
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.
- ynniv 17y ago
  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 http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.txt ].

david927 17y ago

Woz 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. Or you can trust a benevolent dictator to work it out for you. Most Apple afficianados will say the most people don't want that freedom; I'm here to tell you that they do. We don't have to debate. Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month, after the faithful have all bought theirs. Woz will win. Woz always wins.

jsz0 17y ago
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.
- copenja 17y ago
  Relax. Neither open or closed equals total domination.
- eru 17y ago
  What about the original game boy? And numerous other devices.
houseabsolute 17y ago
> Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month We already watched the sales of the iPhone, and we saw how that went. Same type of device, same type of complaints by openness advocate, and what was the result? Are you guys going to just keep on saying this stuff until some closed Apple product fails, then say that's proof that people want openness, ignoring the litany of preceding closed devices that succeeded? I'm here to tell you that this is not a very good argument.

baguasquirrel 17y ago

I get this same vibe from a lot of older folks (or people who want to sound like them, all grizzled and what). True, from a hardware standpoint, Apple devices are closed. What matters today however, is that they are open devices from the perspective of a platform and web software developer. Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone? And lets not forget that we make stuff for normal people here. Not just hackers like us. As it turns out, most folks don't want a hardware-hackable machine. They don't care enough for USB ports. The tablets being championed by MSFT in the previous decade were not much more moddable than the iPad, but I don't see anyone yelling at MSFT about that.

wmf 17y ago
Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone? I must have forgotten that because it isn't true. On my P800 or Blackberry I could install any app, not just approved ones. (Edit: I wonder if this meme about the "cell phone dark ages" comes from the millions of people who switched from dumbphones to iPhone and thus aren't personally familiar with the actual smartphone state of the art circa 2006.)
- drenei 17y ago
  I can't speak for where you are, but here in North America (well Canada & the USA) to go from [cell phone customized for service provider] to [cell phone customized for you with apps that you selected to use] was never a simple process - perhaps easier on a blackberry but not simple. The device makers simply didn't have enough leverage to make the process simple.
  - wmf 17y ago
    I am in the USA and IIRC there was no "process" with my T-Mobile Blackberry; I could install any app I wanted directly from the Web browser. Maybe that's some kind of exception since T-Mobile is the least evil carrier.
- fhars 17y ago
  Smarphones have always been horrible. Have you ever tried to install a JavaME app that does something more useful than storing a high score on a phone? Or dealt with this symbian signing nonsense more than a year or so ago (they made it slightly better with the signing web service since then, but it is still a hassle)? You always have to cope with some certificate authority protection racket, apart from the interresting APIs. The openneess if the iPhone appstore is par for the course here...

nkassis 17y ago

After reading this book about Commodore: http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-Commodore/dp/0973864907/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270671408&sr=1-3 http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-Commodore/d... and a few other good accounts of the period, it really annoys me that Apple get the credit for inventing the personal computer. They were not even the most popular personal computer of the 80s (or 70s). I have a hard time finding anyone who own a Apple II but most of the people I work with were Commodore 64 owners.

stan_rogers 17y ago
The winners get to write the history -- and in the end, more people had more to do with Pagemaker, Illustrator and Photoshop (which were, in practical terms, Mac apps) than they did with the far-more-spectacular (for the time) Video Toaster and Caligari (Amiga). It's never been the machine; it's what people can do with it. If prosumer video was more accessible and lit more imaginations at the time, we'd be singing a different song today.

rbanffy 17y ago

> 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.

Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago
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.
- jcl 17y ago
  Apparently it was not homebrew; here are a couple articles saying that he rented the equipment from the phone company. So the dial-a-joke thing might have been entirely legit. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz.html http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/07.html http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/07.html I'm guessing that when the article describes the dial-a-joke service as illegal, it's confusing it with his blue-box antics, which occurred around the same time. According to the following article (a fun read), the blue box preceded dial-a-joke; he got the inspiration for the service from a dial-a-joke line in New York that he called while demoing blue boxes to potential customers: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_microcomputing.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_mi...

dkersten 17y ago

It 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.

hammerdr 17y ago
iPhone, smartphone and iPad gaming isn't going to be what console or PC gamers are going to expect. However, we're not talking about those type of people buying this device. For example, Brickbreaker has been played by over 50 million people while COD: Modern Warfare 2 has only been played by 15 million. These type of games (that hardcore gamers would consider silly and frivolous) are going to be the dominant games in the marketplace.

neilk 17y ago

This article is basically fluff. It is trying to turn Apple's evolving business strategies into some sort of personality conflict. One that guys like Woz probably wouldn't acknowledge is real. From the moment they were selling real products and not kits, Apple has always wanted to control every aspect of the computing experience. For a while, at Apple, it was considered heresy to be an "Open Mac" supporter -- that is, you thought it was okay to allow third party companies to produce peripherals like disk drives or printers. It was only around '87 or so that the idea of an expandable Mac saw the light of day (the Macintosh II) and that product line slowly petered out in the 90s. People on this thread are suggesting that the OS was hackable with a floppy disk out of some desire to be friendly to tinkerers. Don't be silly. It was that way because there was no other conceivable alternative for software distribution. If we disregard Apple's mid-90s confusions it's been on a steady road towards the iPad since the beginning, in rhetoric if not always in reality.

wrs 17y ago

While the idea of Jobs vs. Woz philosophies seems basically accurate, they diverged a bit later than the author says. Apple had no control over the software and hardware used with the original Macintosh. The author is just flat wrong on this. The serial connectors were a bit weird for the time, but that was it. There was none of the patented-connector, crypto-signed-applications, brick-the-hacked-devices tactics we see with the i* line. The Mac OS didn't even have kernel mode. You could just rewrite all of RAM with your own code and jump to address zero if you felt like it, and people did. The Apple //c was as "closed" as the Macintosh, and I'm pretty sure Woz had something to do with that machine (you could even get a signed limited edition). Modern Macs are made with plenty of standard parts, and the worst that happens if you mess with them is that you void the warranty--which is exactly what happens if you mess with the insides of a Dell or HP computer. The true divergence is that Jobs now has Apple producing consumer entertainment devices in addition to computers. Obviously, the tradeoffs and rules are different for consumer entertainment devices. Whether it's an iPhone, a PS3, or the radio in my car, the manufacturer isn't interested in supporting openness and arbitrary hacking--they are expected to make a functional, attractive product that "just works", which requires maintaining some control over what goes into it. P.S. AT&T Wireless is the result of AT&T absorbing McCaw Cellular, and separated again from AT&T years ago, so while it's fun to talk about the irony of Jobs' blue-boxing, that wasn't really quite the same company.

CamperBob 17y ago

Hmm, I'm beginning to see why they used an Apple ][+ in LOST. Jobs as the Man in Black, against Woz's Jacob. ("You have no idea how much I want to kill you.")

jacquesm 17y ago

There are multiple 'axis' to this victory business, and this one - the money angle - is only a single way of interpreting all this. If I could choose between the two of them as human beings I'd pick Wozniak for sure, he's one of the nicest 'well to do' people that ever came out of silicon valley. Jobs is simply still in a pissing match with Gates, and it looks like he will be able to prove some day that Apples view of the software market was even more closed than Microsofts, and potentially far more profitable. I bought a Mac for my son a couple of years ago, I'm beginning to regret that decision. At the time it was to open his eyes to the fact that not every computer on the planet runs the same operating system and that diversity is good. Now I'm not so sure that an Apple was the right way to express that (he already had an older linux computer to play with blender on, but it was definitely past its prime). Money is a very convenient yardstick to measure success by, but it collapses a lot of data in to a single number and it does not tell you the history of how it got there. Clearly 'open' is never going to make as much money as 'closed', the RIAA and MPAA are all too aware of that, but longer term 'open' will always win because stuff that is special today is a commodity tomorrow. Remember the times when each and every piece of electronics came with it's own weird set of proprietary protocols and connectors? Now it's all IP and we're better off because of that, except for the lawyers.