take a bite from the cool blue crystal apple
ok .. spent some time looking at quartz (most extreme window manager) and apple's hodgepodge of "XFree .. no opendesktop .. no X.org .. eh who cares who gets the credit" proprietary hook hacks (erm .. i mean improvements .. odd they don't pass out the good stuff) .. and decided to continue with my apple rantings ..
(yep .. that's woz and jobs, courtesy of woz' site)
i know they're onto something .. i keep coming back to them and staring at their stuff .. i also like that they make an effort with opensource for their staple .. but there's something inherently different, something missing in my mind .. there's not enough woz left in the soul of apple and way too much steve .. the picture above from Wozniack's site says it all .. just look at how the image of steve is a harrowingly familiar foreshadowed spectre to the hip mac crowd .. i can't count the number of times that i'll be looking at a mac or apple product and somebody comes over, often looking (or trying to look) like steve in this picture, and starts picking on what you're working with or looking at without even acknowledging your presence .. i mean there's something oddly anti-relational and aloof that seems to get transcended through to mac users (ok, ok, i'm stereotyping heavily here) - but it's even present in the interface .. it's like the hip cool blue plasticky box that's trying to be professional by adopting the geriatric silver "i'm an expensive luxury vehicle - so you can feel comfortable paying twice the price for my quality product" look .. and that's the part that they leave out of opensource, because it's what they want to own and what they can't opensource - their branding .. imho, macs never fully caught their potential in the 80's because they were too much of a fad .. and now 20 years later when the new generation of kids get exposed to the same thing, history repeats itself.
i'd much rather see computing naturally blended into an environment .. i mean come on, we look like freaks these days with wires sticking out of our heads and electronic notebooks with antiquated typewriter driven keypads producing drivel on oddly lit fragile screens .. someday we'll look back at the pictures and commercials of this generation and laugh .. just like we do when we see the huge cellphones from the early 90's or think about 8-tracks, betamax, and laserdiscs
(1) Do you apply the same arguments to cars or stereo systems? Try re-reading what you wrote, substituting "BMW" for "Mac", "driver" for "user", and "driving" for "computing".
(2) In your vision for Apple (which I admit that I can't quite understand) what's the business model?
Posted by Geoff Arnold on August 03, 2004 at 09:55 AM EDT #
s/mac/bmw/g: 4 substitutions
s/user/driver/g: 1 substitution
s/computing/driving/g: 1 substitution
your analogy doesn't quite translate .. i could take:
i'd much rather see transportation naturally blended into an environment which is absolutely true .. i'm all for dependable public/private mass transportation that's naturally integrated into a cityscape/landscape as opposed to luxury vehicles .. of course all of this makes senese with wireless transmission of power .. but that's a much larger discussion
2) if you catch my drift here .. i liked woz' approach when he was at apple - he seemed a little purer in terms of advancing exploration and enhancing curiosity rather than just creating stylized widgets. sure a stylized widget is cool, but it's the technology driving behind it that makes it useful as a tool, and it's that use that i deem more important. don't get me wrong .. i'm not saying there isn't a place for art (am a bit of an artist myself) .. it's just that apple seems too focused on one form of art (their branding) rather than encouraging and promoting multiple brands by helping to set and influence the industry standards .. i mean they're doing that to some degree, but just like jobs .. there's a dysfunctional ingrown aspect to apple that's reminiscent of the early mac days.
hence .. that's my rant
Posted by .je on August 07, 2004 at 01:02 PM EDT #
AFAIK the "problem" Apple had in the early 80's, and you have to try and have the mindset of back then, was to put computers in homes; they wanted to go up against IBM.
When IBM released the PC with Microsoft's licensed DOS they also made the PC architecture available to other manufacturers, so that started the whole "IBM PC and Compatibles" branding. This, in turn, made hardware and software more affordable, more easily available, and more of it.
I don't know if Apple did release its architecture but I did hear there were some Apple clones in the late '80s which, as rumor has it, performed better than Apple-manufactured computers.
Imagine what would have happened if IBM had sole control over the PC architecture and Microsoft had been producing DOS exclusively for IBM. They'd most likely had been (and probably still today) way more expensive than Apple.
No one can argue how great Woz's contributions to Apple were but they still have some great engineers and other people working there. But they still something to set them apart from the PC world...and that's where Jobs' line of thinking comes in.
Both Jobs and Woz are great thinkers and innovators and contributed to Apple's birth and growth. They just contributed in different ways. If Apple had started out with two guys who thought exactly alike (whether it was like Woz or like Jobs) it probably wouldn't have taken-off nor remained alive all these years nor had the come-back we've seen since the first iMac came out.
Posted by Oscar on August 30, 2004 at 03:24 PM EDT #