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Of course he would. He was a regular hacker. If you've read Steve Jobs' biographies they all describe Woz wanting to keep things open and hackable and Jobs push

Of course he would. He was a regular hacker. If you've read Steve Jobs' biographies they all describe Woz wanting to keep things open and hackable and Jobs pushing through for the vertical integration they have now. Woz made the altruistic decision most of us would've "preferred" but Jobs made the decision to create the most valuable company in the world instead. Hard to say who was right, really.

ffggvv 5y ago
idk if those things are fundamentally oppoosed. i’m not sure if apple was a little more open it would suddenly massively hurt sales
Swenrekcah 5y ago
In terms of providing value to Apple shareholders I think Steve Jobs clearly made the right decision. I terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak. Of course Apple has provided a lot of value to users and the world but much more limited than if everything was hackable and repairable. I guess my point is that I suspect, if you could add up the additional value of an 'open Apple' for every individual, you would end up with a considerably larger amount than the current market cap of Apple. Let's do some math. Apple market cap is $2.4T right now. Let's say a third of the world could use their products in some form, that's $2,4T divided by 2.7B people or $900 per potential user. If I could extend the life of my iPhone by 4 years with repairs I've already recouped "my share". And that's without mentioning any other product or the added value of being able to customize and repurpose old stuff. Of course some of Apple's achievments wouldn't have been possible without their business model, but I think there should be a pressure on companies to open source technology after a certain period of time. It would be to the benefit of society.
- traveler01 5y ago
  I love how hypocritical these companies are. Environment friendly they say: - Force people to buy a part separately that could easily be included in the box (wasting less packaging in the process). - Force people to replace unnecessary parts when repairing their products (my gfs MacBook broke the screen internally, without applying much strenght to it, and Apple repair solution is to replace the entire top end of the laptop for 600€) - Make stupid expensive for people to repair their products, and almost impossible for third party shops to repair them. And this isn't just Apple, most brands are going the same route. Meanwhile world its sinking in garbage, but shareholders are happy I guess.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Fairphone is the answer here.
    - bnajdecki 5y ago
      Haven't heard about them - good to know!
    - Antipode 5y ago
      I really wish they had US support. They'll work if you can get one, but they don't ship to the US so you have to use a third party re-shipper (both for the phone and for replacement parts). Even then their frequency bands aren't optimized for the US so you're likely to have reception issues.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        Have a look at Librem 5 as an alternative.
  - misnome 5y ago
    > Force people to buy a part separately that could easily be included in the box (wasting less packaging in the process). A part that 90% of people probably already own 10 of? Sounds like 10% more packaging and 90% less e-waste? I mean I get the whole "non repairable is bad" argument but Apple stuff has great lifespan and good resale value, thereby being reused instead of junked when upgrading. And they accept devices for recycling, don't they? Of course it could be better, but there are legitimate ways of looking at these things that aren't as unambiguously "Hypocritical" as you are asserting.
    - anothernewdude 5y ago
      Sure, the resale value of broken apple equipment is through the roof.
    - gugagore 5y ago
      What part are you both talking about? Surely you're talking past each other to some degree.
- qaq 5y ago
  this assumes "open Apple" would have actually survived
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    How was Apple hurt by the openness of the Apple II?
- willyt 5y ago
  The catch is that in this hypothetical scenario most people would have had to decide that they wanted a big clunky hackable computer for apple to have been successful enough to have all this money... Judging by what people chose to buy, this doesn't seem to be the case. Personally, I buy raspberry pis for hacking and an iPhone for reliable, secure and frictionless pocket internet. YMMV
  - wila 5y ago
    Repairable does not equate to "big clunky".
    - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
      Arguments like these are used pretty often to defend the practices of corporations and it implies that manufacturers would have to adapt their devices to make them repairable. It is also false for the majority of cases. Reasons many devices are not repairable include: DRM built into parts to prevent replacements, no repair manuals (see Thinkpads compared to macbooks). Also measures to prevent people from flashing the firmware or updating the software once a company decides to drop support despite the hardware being still functional, or easy to put back up to speed by changing a battery. Forcing companies to stop these anti-consumer strategies has 0 impact on the designs while making electronics far more repairable. I find the "right to repair will make my devices big and ugly and appeasing to the evil tinkerers and hackers" angle really dishonest.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        I’m pro-repair (and a regular purchaser of 18-36 month old iPhones and 2-4 year old [often just off-lease] computers). Even given that, I don’t see how “end users must be able to change batteries in a practical way” would not negatively impact the quality of the iPhone I’m holding in my hand right now. From a water-resistance standpoint alone, I think my phone would suffer in at least one dimension that matters to me. (It’s an Xs Max and yes, I bought used, confident that the water resistance was intact. If I sold it now, the next buyer has that same assurance.) Phones get wet at some low (but not insignificant) rate; it’s hard to avoid that across the entire population.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  > I terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak. In theory yes, but it also could have tanked Apple resulting in Jobs/Woz going elsewhere and Apple never becoming what it's become, never pushing Mobile, Music, thinner / better quality laptops, etc. I think in the ideal world we would have a balance between Job's vision and Woz's vision. Having that highly profitable company but the hackable open world. (if that makes sense)
  - christophilus 5y ago
    We don’t know what we would have had. I could imagine Apple having solved the aesthetics while also keeping it hackable. My guess is they’d have come up with a LEGO-like approach to internals, using crazy materials science to find some way to get the blocks thin and strong.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I can just as easily imagine Apple failing to remain an independent going concern through some of its trough periods in the inevitable cycles that companies go through. As a user and an engineer, I’m 100% Woz, but I think Woz without Jobs probably doesn’t give us the Apple of today (just as much as the converse is also true).
    - kmeisthax 5y ago
      ...so like the 2019 Mac Pro?
  - elevaet 5y ago
    The move towards mobile, music, thinner seems an inevitable progression in this vein of technology - analogous to transistor miniaturization that occurs no matter who the players are. The build quality is something we have to credit Apple for though, not to be taken for granted. It does seem like there's a sweet spot in a balance towards Woz's vision of hackability.
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  > Of course some of Apple's achievments wouldn't have been possible without their business model It's better to be more fine grained here. Apple's highest profits wouldn't be possible without creating walled gardens. It's entirely possible, though, that their gains would diminish very little if they hadn't made the decision to glue everything and make their after-2012 computing devices non-upgradeable.
- nathancahill 5y ago
  "For a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
- wheresmycraisin 5y ago
  > Let's say a third of the world could use their products in some form Third of California, maybe. The world? I don't think so.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  > In terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak. Wozniak would have gotten them nowhere, especially in no position to create products worth opening up.
- II2II 5y ago
  > I terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak. As a personality, I like Wozniak more. If I ever had a chance to meet Jobs and Wozniak in person, I suspect that I would find Wozniak to be a much better person than Jobs. That being said, I think that Jobs provided much more value to the world. Wozniak's chief contribution to the world is the Apple II. It is a wonderful computer with fun stories behind its development, but the computer industry would have gone on without it. Apple's early years are culturally significant since it was one of the few success stories that wasn't corporate (in contrast to the Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80), but that story is probably the most significant part about the company. Contrast that to Jobs. As a minimum, the Apple II and Macintosh can be contributed to him. Without his drive, the Apple II would likely be remembered as one of the multitude of personal computers that didn't make it in the marketplace. Without his drive, the GUI as a consumer product would have been set back years and would probably have looked very different. As expensive as the original Macintosh was, it was far less expensive than many of its contemporaries. As crude as the original Macintosh user interface was, it did provide a model for later products. Perhaps his antagonistic attitude towards user serviceability takes away from that, but it isn't all that different from how appliances were treated in the mid-1980's. Edit: expanded a couple of sentences for clarity.
- binarybanana 5y ago
  Screw Apple, but the only time I was glad my phone came with a cable was when the phone had an USB-C port. I have more than enough cables in place anywhere I need. I also don't see the need for another fucking USB charger. Seriously, I have way too many already and don't know what to do with them other than throw away. Also the earphones that often come in the package are worse than useless. I'd be very happy if phones and other devices didn't include already ubiquitous extra stuff. It creates more extra waste than the extra packaging for something you buy only once, anyway. It's different if you buy a printer because you need it to be plugged in and replugging cables behind the desk would be a hassle, but phones only use the cable for charging (sometimes data) and don't need it to be usable. So if you have a cable and a charger that will work for any other phone just as well, just not at the same time if you have multiple. If you have incompatible plugs there are adapters, too. At least for micro USB to USB-C, which I use instead of buying more new cables. Dunno if you can do that with the connector iPhones use. If not, fuck them, but Apple is right that bundling too much crap is a waste, even if they really just wanted to decrease their costs. Ironically, those two things actually mean the same thing! Or at least they should if all externalities were factored in. So they definitely did the right thing, even if for the wrong reasons. But that's capitalism and at least the incentive points in the right direction.
TameAntelope 5y ago
I understand it's important to get this out to the world, but at the same time, this is as surprising as, "The Internet turns out to be a popular way for computers to interconnect!" Woz is the king of hackers, of course he supports right-to-repair.
syshum 5y ago
Like with most things, the correct course was probably somewhere in the middle.
quijoteuniv 5y ago
Really? I think it is easy to point which was right. I guess for some the mind programming is too strong and cannot be free of it. Greed and profit is eating our planet resources, and there is a huge amount of people, which are not the beneficiaries of those monsters that are willing to protect the millionares. Just because they have been sold propaganda they cannot get out of their head.
shocks 5y ago
> Hard to say who was right, really. Depends on your perspective. If you’re a greedy corporation, Jobs was right. If you’re literally anyone else (not-greedy corporation, if they exist, or consumer) then Woz.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  Don't think its that clear cut. Personally I totally agree with Woz sentiment on right to repair. Absolutely right. However from a software POV I absolutely love the Apple ecosystem and the level of integration that comes with it. I love that I don't need to think of my phone as a computer that needs protecting or configuring extensively. So it's hard to say. I can talk all day how I agree with Woz in principal but ultimately I really enjoy using macOS and Steve Jobs vision is basically why it's ended up how it has.
  - shocks 5y ago
    I’m focusing mainly on the hardware here. If your sole advantage is being able to strong arm your customers into paying you for repair, then that’s shameful. FWIW I’m guilty of typing this from my iPhone.
    - breakfastduck 5y ago
      Yeah that’s fair. I’m biased in the way I care much more about the software experience than the hardware (within reason). Apples approach when it comes to repairability is really poor.
taylodl 5y ago
Jobs was right, though that's not what I believed at the time! Eliminating expansion slots from the Apple II spurred development in SCSI, Firewire, and ultimately USB. Now we're used to taking any kind of device and connecting it to a USB port and it simply working. Jobs obsession with thinness has also eliminated several other wires: wireless networking is universal and most of us are aghast when needing to use an ethernet cable, same for wireless printing, keyboards and mice/trackpads, and more recently we've been accustomed to wireless headphones. I think all of this would have happened eventually but you have to admit Jobs drove this.
- rasz 5y ago
  Your logic is erm, flawed. Imagine the innovation we could encourage by banning wheels on cars!
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    The reason why not every cynic can replace Steve Jobs is that Steve Jobs knew to force things only if they actually could be forced. It didn’t always work out but often enough.
    - taylodl 5y ago
      Correct. Jobs didn't recommend eliminating expansion slots without having an alternative on hand. The same thing happened when they eliminated the floppy drive from their iMacs in the 90's - they had an alternative on hand, the USB drive. They were new at the time and certainly not widespread but its adoption by the iMac changed all that.
  - deelowe 5y ago
    Exactly. Plus, Apple wasn't exactly a market leader when USB became ubiquitous. I'd imagine the camera industry had a much larger impact on usb adoption and associated data rate increases.
  - taylodl 5y ago
    Your counterargument is flawed - nobody banned anything. These were the choices made by a private company to its own product line in order to better serve its customers and boost sales. Apple wasn't even the first company to choose this route. In 1984 when the Mac was released the most successful personal computer of the time was the Commodore 64 - which had no expansion slots, relying instead on a daisy-chained external serial bus for expansion. The computer makers of the time realized simplicity was the key to mass consumer adoption and thus increased sales. I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs pointed to the Commodore 64 when insisting expansion slots not be present in the Mac.
rimliu 5y ago
"most of us"? [citation needed]
TeeMassive 5y ago
Wozniak actually talks about this. Devices that came with circuit diagrams would sell more because people could repair them for cheap. I know I certainly would pick a repairable phone over an epoxy brick.

ffggvv 5y ago

idk if those things are fundamentally oppoosed. i’m not sure if apple was a little more open it would suddenly massively hurt sales

Swenrekcah 5y ago

In terms of providing value to Apple shareholders I think Steve Jobs clearly made the right decision. I terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak. Of course Apple has provided a lot of value to users and the world but much more limited than if everything was hackable and repairable. I guess my point is that I suspect, if you could add up the additional value of an 'open Apple' for every individual, you would end up with a considerably larger amount than the current market cap of Apple. Let's do some math. Apple market cap is $2.4T right now. Let's say a third of the world could use their products in some form, that's $2,4T divided by 2.7B people or $900 per potential user. If I could extend the life of my iPhone by 4 years with repairs I've already recouped "my share". And that's without mentioning any other product or the added value of being able to customize and repurpose old stuff. Of course some of Apple's achievments wouldn't have been possible without their business model, but I think there should be a pressure on companies to open source technology after a certain period of time. It would be to the benefit of society.

traveler01 5y ago
I love how hypocritical these companies are. Environment friendly they say: - Force people to buy a part separately that could easily be included in the box (wasting less packaging in the process). - Force people to replace unnecessary parts when repairing their products (my gfs MacBook broke the screen internally, without applying much strenght to it, and Apple repair solution is to replace the entire top end of the laptop for 600€) - Make stupid expensive for people to repair their products, and almost impossible for third party shops to repair them. And this isn't just Apple, most brands are going the same route. Meanwhile world its sinking in garbage, but shareholders are happy I guess.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Fairphone is the answer here.
  - bnajdecki 5y ago
    Haven't heard about them - good to know!
  - Antipode 5y ago
    I really wish they had US support. They'll work if you can get one, but they don't ship to the US so you have to use a third party re-shipper (both for the phone and for replacement parts). Even then their frequency bands aren't optimized for the US so you're likely to have reception issues.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      Have a look at Librem 5 as an alternative.
- misnome 5y ago
  > Force people to buy a part separately that could easily be included in the box (wasting less packaging in the process). A part that 90% of people probably already own 10 of? Sounds like 10% more packaging and 90% less e-waste? I mean I get the whole "non repairable is bad" argument but Apple stuff has great lifespan and good resale value, thereby being reused instead of junked when upgrading. And they accept devices for recycling, don't they? Of course it could be better, but there are legitimate ways of looking at these things that aren't as unambiguously "Hypocritical" as you are asserting.
  - anothernewdude 5y ago
    Sure, the resale value of broken apple equipment is through the roof.
  - gugagore 5y ago
    What part are you both talking about? Surely you're talking past each other to some degree.
qaq 5y ago
this assumes "open Apple" would have actually survived
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  How was Apple hurt by the openness of the Apple II?
willyt 5y ago
The catch is that in this hypothetical scenario most people would have had to decide that they wanted a big clunky hackable computer for apple to have been successful enough to have all this money... Judging by what people chose to buy, this doesn't seem to be the case. Personally, I buy raspberry pis for hacking and an iPhone for reliable, secure and frictionless pocket internet. YMMV
- wila 5y ago
  Repairable does not equate to "big clunky".
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
    Arguments like these are used pretty often to defend the practices of corporations and it implies that manufacturers would have to adapt their devices to make them repairable. It is also false for the majority of cases. Reasons many devices are not repairable include: DRM built into parts to prevent replacements, no repair manuals (see Thinkpads compared to macbooks). Also measures to prevent people from flashing the firmware or updating the software once a company decides to drop support despite the hardware being still functional, or easy to put back up to speed by changing a battery. Forcing companies to stop these anti-consumer strategies has 0 impact on the designs while making electronics far more repairable. I find the "right to repair will make my devices big and ugly and appeasing to the evil tinkerers and hackers" angle really dishonest.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I’m pro-repair (and a regular purchaser of 18-36 month old iPhones and 2-4 year old [often just off-lease] computers). Even given that, I don’t see how “end users must be able to change batteries in a practical way” would not negatively impact the quality of the iPhone I’m holding in my hand right now. From a water-resistance standpoint alone, I think my phone would suffer in at least one dimension that matters to me. (It’s an Xs Max and yes, I bought used, confident that the water resistance was intact. If I sold it now, the next buyer has that same assurance.) Phones get wet at some low (but not insignificant) rate; it’s hard to avoid that across the entire population.
philliphaydon 5y ago
> I terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak. In theory yes, but it also could have tanked Apple resulting in Jobs/Woz going elsewhere and Apple never becoming what it's become, never pushing Mobile, Music, thinner / better quality laptops, etc. I think in the ideal world we would have a balance between Job's vision and Woz's vision. Having that highly profitable company but the hackable open world. (if that makes sense)
- christophilus 5y ago
  We don’t know what we would have had. I could imagine Apple having solved the aesthetics while also keeping it hackable. My guess is they’d have come up with a LEGO-like approach to internals, using crazy materials science to find some way to get the blocks thin and strong.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I can just as easily imagine Apple failing to remain an independent going concern through some of its trough periods in the inevitable cycles that companies go through. As a user and an engineer, I’m 100% Woz, but I think Woz without Jobs probably doesn’t give us the Apple of today (just as much as the converse is also true).
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    ...so like the 2019 Mac Pro?
- elevaet 5y ago
  The move towards mobile, music, thinner seems an inevitable progression in this vein of technology - analogous to transistor miniaturization that occurs no matter who the players are. The build quality is something we have to credit Apple for though, not to be taken for granted. It does seem like there's a sweet spot in a balance towards Woz's vision of hackability.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
> Of course some of Apple's achievments wouldn't have been possible without their business model It's better to be more fine grained here. Apple's highest profits wouldn't be possible without creating walled gardens. It's entirely possible, though, that their gains would diminish very little if they hadn't made the decision to glue everything and make their after-2012 computing devices non-upgradeable.
nathancahill 5y ago
"For a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
wheresmycraisin 5y ago
> Let's say a third of the world could use their products in some form Third of California, maybe. The world? I don't think so.
tinus_hn 5y ago
> In terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak. Wozniak would have gotten them nowhere, especially in no position to create products worth opening up.
II2II 5y ago
> I terms of providing value to the world at large they should have gone with Wozniak. As a personality, I like Wozniak more. If I ever had a chance to meet Jobs and Wozniak in person, I suspect that I would find Wozniak to be a much better person than Jobs. That being said, I think that Jobs provided much more value to the world. Wozniak's chief contribution to the world is the Apple II. It is a wonderful computer with fun stories behind its development, but the computer industry would have gone on without it. Apple's early years are culturally significant since it was one of the few success stories that wasn't corporate (in contrast to the Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80), but that story is probably the most significant part about the company. Contrast that to Jobs. As a minimum, the Apple II and Macintosh can be contributed to him. Without his drive, the Apple II would likely be remembered as one of the multitude of personal computers that didn't make it in the marketplace. Without his drive, the GUI as a consumer product would have been set back years and would probably have looked very different. As expensive as the original Macintosh was, it was far less expensive than many of its contemporaries. As crude as the original Macintosh user interface was, it did provide a model for later products. Perhaps his antagonistic attitude towards user serviceability takes away from that, but it isn't all that different from how appliances were treated in the mid-1980's. Edit: expanded a couple of sentences for clarity.
binarybanana 5y ago
Screw Apple, but the only time I was glad my phone came with a cable was when the phone had an USB-C port. I have more than enough cables in place anywhere I need. I also don't see the need for another fucking USB charger. Seriously, I have way too many already and don't know what to do with them other than throw away. Also the earphones that often come in the package are worse than useless. I'd be very happy if phones and other devices didn't include already ubiquitous extra stuff. It creates more extra waste than the extra packaging for something you buy only once, anyway. It's different if you buy a printer because you need it to be plugged in and replugging cables behind the desk would be a hassle, but phones only use the cable for charging (sometimes data) and don't need it to be usable. So if you have a cable and a charger that will work for any other phone just as well, just not at the same time if you have multiple. If you have incompatible plugs there are adapters, too. At least for micro USB to USB-C, which I use instead of buying more new cables. Dunno if you can do that with the connector iPhones use. If not, fuck them, but Apple is right that bundling too much crap is a waste, even if they really just wanted to decrease their costs. Ironically, those two things actually mean the same thing! Or at least they should if all externalities were factored in. So they definitely did the right thing, even if for the wrong reasons. But that's capitalism and at least the incentive points in the right direction.

TameAntelope 5y ago

I understand it's important to get this out to the world, but at the same time, this is as surprising as, "The Internet turns out to be a popular way for computers to interconnect!" Woz is the king of hackers, of course he supports right-to-repair.

syshum 5y ago

Like with most things, the correct course was probably somewhere in the middle.

quijoteuniv 5y ago

Really? I think it is easy to point which was right. I guess for some the mind programming is too strong and cannot be free of it. Greed and profit is eating our planet resources, and there is a huge amount of people, which are not the beneficiaries of those monsters that are willing to protect the millionares. Just because they have been sold propaganda they cannot get out of their head.

shocks 5y ago

> Hard to say who was right, really. Depends on your perspective. If you’re a greedy corporation, Jobs was right. If you’re literally anyone else (not-greedy corporation, if they exist, or consumer) then Woz.

breakfastduck 5y ago
Don't think its that clear cut. Personally I totally agree with Woz sentiment on right to repair. Absolutely right. However from a software POV I absolutely love the Apple ecosystem and the level of integration that comes with it. I love that I don't need to think of my phone as a computer that needs protecting or configuring extensively. So it's hard to say. I can talk all day how I agree with Woz in principal but ultimately I really enjoy using macOS and Steve Jobs vision is basically why it's ended up how it has.
- shocks 5y ago
  I’m focusing mainly on the hardware here. If your sole advantage is being able to strong arm your customers into paying you for repair, then that’s shameful. FWIW I’m guilty of typing this from my iPhone.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    Yeah that’s fair. I’m biased in the way I care much more about the software experience than the hardware (within reason). Apples approach when it comes to repairability is really poor.

taylodl 5y ago

Jobs was right, though that's not what I believed at the time! Eliminating expansion slots from the Apple II spurred development in SCSI, Firewire, and ultimately USB. Now we're used to taking any kind of device and connecting it to a USB port and it simply working. Jobs obsession with thinness has also eliminated several other wires: wireless networking is universal and most of us are aghast when needing to use an ethernet cable, same for wireless printing, keyboards and mice/trackpads, and more recently we've been accustomed to wireless headphones. I think all of this would have happened eventually but you have to admit Jobs drove this.

rasz 5y ago
Your logic is erm, flawed. Imagine the innovation we could encourage by banning wheels on cars!
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  The reason why not every cynic can replace Steve Jobs is that Steve Jobs knew to force things only if they actually could be forced. It didn’t always work out but often enough.
  - taylodl 5y ago
    Correct. Jobs didn't recommend eliminating expansion slots without having an alternative on hand. The same thing happened when they eliminated the floppy drive from their iMacs in the 90's - they had an alternative on hand, the USB drive. They were new at the time and certainly not widespread but its adoption by the iMac changed all that.
- deelowe 5y ago
  Exactly. Plus, Apple wasn't exactly a market leader when USB became ubiquitous. I'd imagine the camera industry had a much larger impact on usb adoption and associated data rate increases.
- taylodl 5y ago
  Your counterargument is flawed - nobody banned anything. These were the choices made by a private company to its own product line in order to better serve its customers and boost sales. Apple wasn't even the first company to choose this route. In 1984 when the Mac was released the most successful personal computer of the time was the Commodore 64 - which had no expansion slots, relying instead on a daisy-chained external serial bus for expansion. The computer makers of the time realized simplicity was the key to mass consumer adoption and thus increased sales. I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs pointed to the Commodore 64 when insisting expansion slots not be present in the Mac.

rimliu 5y ago

"most of us"? [citation needed]

TeeMassive 5y ago

Wozniak actually talks about this. Devices that came with circuit diagrams would sell more because people could repair them for cheap. I know I certainly would pick a repairable phone over an epoxy brick.