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Apple has drifted so far from the spirit Woz infused it with with the Apple II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II Fr

Apple has drifted so far from the spirit Woz infused it with with the Apple II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II From the article:Wozniak's open design and the Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices to expand the capabilities of the machine. The true engineer ethos. Let people add on, build, and convert the system to their needs. Now it's just shove shiny expensive stuff at them and don't trust the user or developer to change anything. What a way to treat users, like children.

thomasmallen 18y ago
Yep. The iPhone is a console.
iigs 18y ago
Yes, and it sucks, but it has been this way for a pretty long time. Jobs was never about expandability/hackability -- the original Macintosh required a special tool to open the case, wherein you could do nothing to it as it had no user serviceable parts. I had never looked before, but it doesn't appear that it even had any socketed ICs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh-motherboard.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh-motherboard.jpg , but it did have a proper font silk screened on this board that nobody ever saw. Jobs has used engineering as a means to create the experience -- Woz used the experience as a means to create engineer{s, ing}, something that I owe my love of computers and even my nickname to. :) That said, so long as Apple essentially has a monopoly on the smartphone experience, it behooves them to control the experience of the device (via third party applications) with an iron fist -- there's very little down side to arbitrary or even counterproductive behavior so long as the experience is maintained. Should ecosystem ever matter more than the device experience, Apple will be forced to sing a different tune, but given Nokia + MS's head start and performance since the release of the iPhone I wouldn't be hopeful.
- allenbrunson 18y ago
  looks like the ROMs are socketed. and that's the part that you'd be most likely to want changed.
  - iigs 18y ago
    You are absolutely correct. I would say that I'd rather have the RAM ICs socketed, though, especially considering that the first Mac had a meager 128k of it. :(
    - kragen 18y ago
      Could you piggyback RAM by soldering it on top of the existing chips, bending out a single chip-enable pin so it alone wasn't in parallel with the existing chips, and soldering it to a wire? I had an H89 with 64K of RAM; the last 16K was hacked in that way.
      - ComputerGuru 18y ago
        Not without switching around the address lines, at the very least.

thomasmallen 18y ago

Yep. The iPhone is a console.

iigs 18y ago

Yes, and it sucks, but it has been this way for a pretty long time. Jobs was never about expandability/hackability -- the original Macintosh required a special tool to open the case, wherein you could do nothing to it as it had no user serviceable parts. I had never looked before, but it doesn't appear that it even had any socketed ICs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh-motherboard.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh-motherboard.jpg , but it did have a proper font silk screened on this board that nobody ever saw. Jobs has used engineering as a means to create the experience -- Woz used the experience as a means to create engineer{s, ing}, something that I owe my love of computers and even my nickname to. :) That said, so long as Apple essentially has a monopoly on the smartphone experience, it behooves them to control the experience of the device (via third party applications) with an iron fist -- there's very little down side to arbitrary or even counterproductive behavior so long as the experience is maintained. Should ecosystem ever matter more than the device experience, Apple will be forced to sing a different tune, but given Nokia + MS's head start and performance since the release of the iPhone I wouldn't be hopeful.

allenbrunson 18y ago
looks like the ROMs are socketed. and that's the part that you'd be most likely to want changed.
- iigs 18y ago
  You are absolutely correct. I would say that I'd rather have the RAM ICs socketed, though, especially considering that the first Mac had a meager 128k of it. :(
  - kragen 18y ago
    Could you piggyback RAM by soldering it on top of the existing chips, bending out a single chip-enable pin so it alone wasn't in parallel with the existing chips, and soldering it to a wire? I had an H89 with 64K of RAM; the last 16K was hacked in that way.
    - ComputerGuru 18y ago
      Not without switching around the address lines, at the very least.