We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day In case you missed it, Apple is already the second biggest corporation in the world in terms of capitalization and is poised to pass Exxon as number one, possibly this winter with the iPad this year’s most coveted Xmas gift. The Silicon Valley company is sitting on some 50 billion in cash, pretty well positioned to do whatever it takes to maintain their technological/aesthetic edge. That’s one helluva long way from two young guys in a garage, tinkering with a computer. It’s close to the most extraordinary business story of all time.
– Roger L. Simon. Today I wrote out a cheque for a new super-fast computer, but not an Apple Mac, a PC. But, what kind of purgatory would the PC be in now, without the Mac keeping it semi-honest and semi-friendly and semi-nice-to look-at? Thank you Bill Gates, but thank you even more: Steve Jobs.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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You’re kidding, right? All the Mac has ever done is prove that old adage that a fool and his money are easily parted.
Of course I’m not kidding. Apple leads where Microsoft follows and it has been like this for a quarter of a century. You want to know what Windows will do in a few years time? Look at what Macs do now.
This kind of Macolyte argument always reminds me of those people who insist that nobody would have thought of a law against murder if not for the existence of the Ten Commandments.
Forget the carping; what Jobs has done in terms of improving the happiness of mankind puts him far in front of any politician or suchlike in the past 20 years. We don’t celebrate such entrepreneurs enough. Take a bow, Steve.
Okay, I’m a Macolyte. Good word.
The point is not just the mere fact of progress. It is the speed of it and the nature of it.
Sure, Gates and co might have thought of it all, approximately. But how fast and how well would they have done it, without Jobs doing his thing? Not nearly so, and not nearly so, I say.
I just don’t believe that without Jobs, the story of computers and especially of computer screens would have been the same.
Oh good grief. Why not just get the Pope to canonise the wanker and be done with it?
It’s quite amazing the blind hate some otherwise mostly reasonable people have about Apple!
Tablet computers are a wonderful example of the difference.
Bill Gates has been pushing the tablet computer concept for 15 years, with very little success. There have been a lot of different models made, but none have sold well. Until Apple jumped into the market that is, and has been selling a million iPads a month since April.
The iPhone of course is another great example. Everyone thought the mobile phone market was mature, crowded, and no new manufacturer had a chance. Three years later Apple have grabbed a third of the profits in the entire industry (all phones, not just smart phones) with just a few percent market share, everyone else is scrambling to copy them, and marketshare (but not profit) leaders Nokia and LG have fired their CEOs.
It can’t be just Macolytes. I saw a lot of people buying iPhone 3GSs last year who had never bought anything Apple in their life before, and it’s just astounding the people I’m seeing with iPhone 4’s this year, despite them still being hard to get hold of in this country.
Brian, Steve Jobs got the idea of the GUI from its actual inventors, Xerox PARC, then tried through the courts to stop anybody else (Microsoft, Digital Research) implementing them on their systems. Once you have the idea of the GUI, the development path it has taken is pretty obvious and natural. There’s no special Jobs genius required.
There’s a direct philosophical divide between Apple and the Wintel platform; Apple represents Progressive command and control. You get what you’re given, and if you don’t like it it is you that are wrong. Wintel is a free market platform with myriad suppliers; the Windows OS “hegemony” exists only because it’s not really a hegemony. MS have always had to develop in a way that allows all those different hardware and software suppliers to coexist. They’ve never had the option of a closed platform as the Mac platform is.
The truth is that the Mac platform has largely been an irrelevance. Most corporate and home users have never used it and never will, and sometimes it has done something first but that had no real effect on the evolution of the PC, which followed a gradual and pretty logical course as the hardware gained in capability, rather than the usual Jobs philosophy of launching “teh future” on underpowered hardware (Lisa, Mac). I’m looking right now at an ancient (1987) PS/2 Model 60 that I revived a few weeks ago. The processor is a 10MHz 286. It runs DOS. It just about runs Windows 3.1. But at the time it was a perfectly good, efficient platform for word processing, data management, etc, deployed widely in offices, while Mac users were staring at their tiny built in screens wondering whether anyone would ever write a game for the damned thing and hoping it wouldn’t overheat because putting a fan inside it had been decreed as heretical by Saint Jobs.
Outside a small niche of graphics professionals in black turtlenecks, the Mac platform was effectively entirely irrelevant until Jobs hit on the idea of trendy information appliances with the iMac which he could sell to people who wanted to be fashionable and wear a turtleneck too and didn’t care that the actual computer was a piece of shit. He’s since built an enormous marketing operation based on that paradigm and one can admire him for that in the same sense one admires L Ron Hubbard for selling Operating Thetan courses. And part of that superb marketing is convincing people that somehow the rest of the computer business- the other 99%- were all copying him.
The success of that marketing has now become actively dangerous for computing and communications, as Jobs and other Proggies (Google the obvious example here) are working to turn all our computing into a set of walled gardens controlled by a few philosopher kings who are overtly leftist. They even use quasi religious terminology; thin client-server becomes “the cloud”. Good grief. The people flocking to this new religious paradigm are, needless to say, overwhelmingly proggressivists, wetting their pants at the idea of everybody being locked into their worldview forever.
In summary; Apple have done nothing but harm to computing and are a clear and present danger to our freedom. Any libertarian worth his salt ought to despise Steve Jobs and the whole nauseating empire he has built. He is the very model of why we have business, but not free markets.
I’m not a techie, and don’t really have a dog in this fight (although I only use PCs). And I was following along in IanB’s latest screed until I got to the last sentence: “He is the very model of why we have business, but not free markets.” Whoa, there; that’s just too far over the top. So Jobs developed a platform and he doesn’t want people monkeying with it. Fine; that’s entirely his perogative. It’s his product and his company. You can buy it or not; that’s entirely your perogative. But that is the epitome of “free markets.” Neither you nor he is required to do anything. Jobs isn’t demanding that the government coerce you into buying his product (neither, of course, is Gates).
I don’t know what your definition of “free markets” is, IanB, but apparently it isn’t close to mine.
Laird, the point I’m driving at is that Jobs, Schmidt and their ilk are the modern version of those “enlightened” businessmen of the Victorian and Progressive eras e.g. the Rowntrees, Henry Frod, Lord Leverhulme etc who replaced the free market paradigm with the Captians Of Industry corporatist paradigm which is central to anglo-socialism. Saying, “it’s their money/company they can do what they like” is true but too narrow an analysis. These are businessmen who actively participate in and encourage statism and are as much the enemy of liberty as any trotskyist. Bear in mind that much of the funding in the Progressivist network comes from trusts etc founded by these businessmen-who-were-not-free-marketeers.
But I’ve never heard that Jobs provides funding for the “progressivist network” or otherwise actively encourages statism. Do you know that he does? If so, that’s grounds for criticism, but without more the mere fact that he runs his company the way he chooses doesn’t merit such a harsh attack. If I had control of a unique technology I’d probably do exactly the same thing. (And actually, if you’re going to criticize anyone, from what I’ve been reading about Gates’ foundation that’s the one pushing the progressive agenda; you should be attacking him, not holding him up as a paragon.)
If you want to thank someone, please thank the Taiwanese. They are the ones who brought the price of computers down to cheap home appliance levels.
I think my point is pretty clear Laird. It is that the Apple “choice edited” paradigm is overtly progressivist and overtly appeals to progressives. Maybe I’ve just argued more “liberals” crowing about how the centralised control implicit in Apple hardware proves that command-control works better than the “chaos” epitomised by the PC than you have. That is, that it is proof that the correct model for markets is choice-editing by experts, and Macs prove that is correct. It might be fair to say that my earlier unfocussed unease at the Mac developed into my current feel-it-in-my-balls hatred largely as a result of such discussions. The Mac stands as living proof to the enturtlenecked that choice is a Bad Thing.
The birth of the personal computer was an enormous shift of power to individuals. There is now an enormously powerful coalition typified by the likes of Apple, Google, Mozilla etc determined to reverse that power shift and, as a libertarian, I can honestly say that I believe that those people trying to do that to us are “Doing Evil” on an enormous scale.
Ian B, what happened? Did Stevie J. run over your dog?
Seriously, such “tall poppy” syndrome makes you like a bit of a grouch.
So don’t buy their stuff. You are taking your analogy too far. Yes, Jobs runs his business a little like Stalin ran the Soviet Union (without all the blood, starvation etc.). Yes, he’s probably not much fun to have round to dinner (though I bet he’s more fun than Bill Gates). Still he’s only one businessman in competition with others and your responses are therefore somewhat disproportionate. There is no reason a libertarian can’t use Macs (and no reason he must).
“tall poppy syndrome”?
Okay, I give up. I’ve pointed out where the edge of the cliff is, but if you want to keep running with the rest of the lemmings, that’s up to you. No pressure.
Not the red button, Ian B, not the red button!
I’ve said it for years: If I were trapped on a desert island with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, I would poison myself so that none of them could eat my corpse.
Actually, Brian, if you want to know what MS Windows will be like in a few years, take a look at KDE. Seriously, no exaggeration, the first time I saw a Windows 7 screenshot I honestly thought it was a mock-up based on KDE 3.
Ian might be going a bit overboard here, but I’m right with him on this “cloud” nonsense. And Vinegar’s spot-on about the Taiwanese. If it weren’t for the economies of scale of the generic PC, Apple would still be using a custom, closed, architecture and charging even more than it does for it.
I think the point here is that competition is good. A world in which either Gates or Jobs had it all his own way would be worse than what we have.
“Steve Jobs got the idea of the GUI from its actual inventors, Xerox PARC, then tried through the courts to stop anybody else (Microsoft, Digital Research) implementing them on their systems”
That is just so wrong.
First, Ivan Sutherland made the first GUI with “Sketchpad” in 1963.
Second, Apple got a license from Xerox, in exchange for shares in Apple. No one else did that.
Third, the Lisa and Mac GUIs were vastly different from the Xerox one. Perhaps the biggest difference was the concept of “direct manipulation” where, for example, if you wanted to move something then you simply help the mouse button down on it and dragged. On previous systems you clicked on the object to get a menu, chose “Move…”, and then clicked where you wanted to move the object to. But there were a number of other major innovations that originated at Apple, not at Xerox.
Fourth, Apple sued people who copied Apple’s GUI, not anyone who made a GUI at all.
“I’m looking right now at an ancient (1987) PS/2 Model 60 that I revived a few weeks ago. The processor is a 10MHz 286. It runs DOS. It just about runs Windows 3.1. But at the time it was a perfectly good, efficient platform for word processing, data management, etc, deployed widely in offices, while Mac users were staring at their tiny built in screens”
Well, no, actually.
In 1987 I was using a Mac with a 16 MHz 32 bit processor (the 68030). It came standard with a full VGA (640×480) monitor in either grayscale or 8 bit colour, but you could also get 640×870 “A4” portrait monitors (at first from Radius, later from Apple), and soon after 1280×870 “two page displays”. It also had six expansion slots and could thus take up to six video cards and automatically made a large single desktop from any combination of monitors of any mixed size and shape or colour depth. Some friends and I actually got together one evening in 197 to put all our video cards into one Mac and it worked perfectly.
There are very valid criticisms of Apple and Jobs, and actual Mac users are quite vocal in making them — and submitting them as “radar” bugs so that there is a chance that things actually change.
What is quite annoying is people who actually don’t know anything about the subject making wildly inaccurate criticisms based on seemingly little more than their own imagination and prejudices.
Bruce, Jobs’s tour at PARC is well known, as is the horror the PARC crew declared about it, as they knew that Xerox in their idiocy were giving away their technology. All the senior staff refused to do it. THe point is that Jobs didn’t think up the idea of a GUI, somebody else did. If anybody deserves credit for the modern computing paradigm, it is them. They also invented ethernet, and a zillion other ideas. And, Sketchpad isn’t a GUI. It’s the first art program; an innovation certainly but not the same thing. The fact that Apple refined the GUI (as with your move example) doesn’t make them fathers of it; as usual the Macolyte declare rather minor ideas to be startling innovations.
Apple famously tried to stop anybody else’s GUI having overlapping windows; an obvious concept. Their purpose was to cripple other companies’ GUIs (DR, Microsoft).
The Model 60 was a bit example admittedly; it sold poorly at the time because the Model 80 was a better machine (386 etc). And there were already better cheaper machines from clone manufacturers. The point I was making was that PCs have always been designed for practicality whereas Macs are designed for showiness; the original Mac was hopelessly unusable on its hardware. PCs had to be functional for everyday business purposes which Macs didn’t, because they were never used for practical purposes in the same way. Any corporate buyer replacing his PCs with Macs in the 80s would have been a total fool. Not lease because he probably would have been lynched by his staff for forcing them to squint at those ridiculous little built-in screens (the “appliance” concept goes back a long way).
What is quite annoying is people who are followers of the Mac faith assuming that anyone who disagrees with their hagiography “doesn’t know anything”. The Mac never took off because it was always an impractical machine for most users which sacrificed efficiency for “style” and forces its users to like what Steve gives them, rather than get what they want or need.
Should be-
“The Model 60 was a BAD example admittedly”
not sure where I got “bit” from. Also “not least” rather than “not lease”.
Vinegar Joe: that’s a comment I appreciate; I work with guys in the semi-conductor and LCD panel industries day in, day out and one thing which never fails to amaze me is the impression the middle and lower end engineers somehow have that few people in the West even know about Taiwan, let alone give a monkey’s about them.
“…forces its users to like what Steve gives them…”
IanB: are you for real? Nearly every Mac owner I know and have known has also been a PC owner too. And it’s not just my experience either apparently.
How many of you remember the significant (to Apple) investment MSFT made into Apple when Steve Jobs returned?
Does it occur to youse “mavens” (to include the M in the F term for once) that the effects have been to
develop non-duplicative markets as much as to generate some moderately competitive one’s?
The markets so broadened have been symbiotic
Ian B: Have you looked at a smartphone? Ever?
Have you done so, comparing, say, the state of the industry in 2006 with any time after the iPhone had been out for at least one product development cycle?
(For an even bigger example, find some 2006 or early 2007 screenshots of Android, and compare with what Google changed it to in response to the iPhone…)
It sure as hell looks like Apple does innovate in user experience, doesn’t it?
Funny, likewise, how the Windows UX stagnated very nicely until OSX raised the bar there, isn’t it? (Compare Win2k with XP. What happened between them? OSX came out.
It’s not that Microsoft never made improvements to Windows UX (they did) – it’s that OSX seems to have been an obvious driver of the pace and refinement of the changes. Just as Windows features push Apple, and both Windows and OSX push the poor bastards making X slower with KDE and Gnome.
With nothing to compare to, there’s not nearly the pressure to improve, is there?
What are consumers going to do, run Linux? (The answer, by the way, is “no”.)
That competition drives development is not an axiom that I’d think I’d have to repeat here, of all places. But perhaps it is, when ridiculous claims about Apple are around to be made…
(And as Bruce said, Apple shipped some very nice hardware in the pre-OSX era.
The “it costs more!” complaint was also less of a canard then, but… if you wanted a multiple monitor system on consumer hardware and consumer OS before 1998, you had to buy a Mac.
Not only did MacOS do it automatically and nicely, but you couldn’t do it on Windows.
The IBM 8560-041 had a retail price of $5300. The Mac IIx cost $9300 with a hard disk (a year later than the release of the m60-41).
Yep, $4k more.
But you got a 32 bit CPU (with FPU) running at 16mhz rather than 10mhz. (3.9 mips vs 1.5 mips, if that matters.)
And you could put 16 megs of ram without having to buy a pair of $1800 “adapters”. Hmm. Add in that $3600 to $5300 and you have $8900, just $400 less than the IIx.
Sure, that’s a waste if you’re “never gonna need more ram”… and “never gonna need” more than one monitor, let alone one larger than VGA.
But oddly, when you compare comparable capabilities the price differential reduces.
That’s how it is now and how it’s most often been in the Mac vs. PC comparison game.
Or, hey, let’s look at the Mac II, from 1987. It isn’t what Bruce was using, but it’s interesting.
The Mac II had a more comparable 16mhz 68020 and FPU (2.6 mips vs the 1.5 for the PS/2 60-41)… but retailed for $5500 with the HDD. That’s $200 more than the PS/2, and only a 5% difference. And it already has the ram capability you have to pay thousands for to add to the PS/2.
The multi-monitor capacity alone makes up for that kind of difference in price, if you find it useful.
So, no tiny built-in monitor. No overheating, because you forgot the entire Mac II line. And the same price as the PS/2 you lauded as “efficient”, while being more powerful.
And of course Macshad games from the beginning.
The PC/Windows platform, being larger, has long had an advantage, but even in 1987, the idea that nobody could play a game on their poor Macintosh was utterly false.)
Mike, from your link-
Yep, it’s the computer for the trendy upper-class elite, while the PC is the practical computer of the masses. Can’t argue there. If you’ve got money to burn on an appliance that yells “I voted Obama” to all your guests, the Mac is certainly the product for you.
I want my Commodore Amiga back…
Strongly agreed about the Taiwanese. And I recall that they drove forward, in particular, the rather recent arrival of small mobile computers running Windows, crucially making them cheap enough for people to be willing to risk losing or dropping them, which had held many back. Me definitely.
At the risk of turning this thread into an Oscar acceptance speech, who else should we all be thanking?
Re the claim that Apple have stolen some or even all of their best ideas, such as the GUI, this strikes me as a bit like (although not nearly as daft) as saying that Shakespeare contributed nothing to drama, because he stole most of his plots. He did, but his mere “ideas” are not what made Shakespeare Shakespeare. The achievement of Apple is similarly elusive, in that kind of way.
The thing about Apple is that they make things work, and work so beautifully, as others have already pointed out. It’s their execution that is so amazing.
But I rather think Samizdata has had this argument several times before. My original motive for putting up this snippet was because it clocked the amazingness of Apple’s business achievement. Even if all they have been doing is parting fools from their money (which I don’t accept and which is in any case is not that easy a thing to do), they have been doing it on a truly epic scale. The fact that a maker of consumer electronic toys is now outgunning car companies, oil companies, and all the other old school big enterprises, is a remarkable fact about our current world.
However, it also occurs to me to wonder whether the traditional ways of measuring business success may, in some ways, be mis-measuring Apple’s achievement. I certainly have the feeling that Apple may not have the staying power of, say, a big oil company. In that very limited way, I agree with some of the things Ian B has said. Apple is indeed in the aesthetics business, partly. (Which is not to say that aesthetic appeal is insignificant.) Are there other meaningful ways of measuring economic success that put Apple lower down the list?
Backward compatibility / legacy
I hate Apple as a company. In the last two decades for the purposes of my business I have had to buy a number of Macs.
Apple just stiffs you, every time. There is no meaningful support for legacy hardware or software; you just have to throw the old stuff out and buy the new stuff.
For every bit of the PC there are usually lots of suppliers relying on standards that sometimes go back decades. With Apple, they just change things on a whim: at one time I had a collection of a dozen different Apple microphones that could no longer be used because Apple kept changing the size of the jack plug.
As of July 2010, more than 60% of PC users are still using XP. I have two PCs in my office now that are more than a decade old and can still do useful service. The iMac I bought at the same time as these two became an unusable joke about two years later. I couldn’t bring myself to sell it to anyone because it was incapable of running the newer Apple OS and software packages. It just became useless for any purpose.
In short, I don’t care whether Apples are as good as or better than PCs, or who stole whose ideas to make them. They are just technobling and not worthy of consideration for people who want to do more than download music and watch movies.
I’m with you Ian B.
A company based on fashionable bullshit which wouldn’t cause any great difficulty if it (the company) didn’t exist is the second biggest corporation in the world? Set to get to number one which is currently Exxon which produces a vital product that powers our civilization. Get out!
One other thing. If you are going to do any support of scientific or technical instrumentation you write your support software for the Windows/PC platform.
Mozilla?
Well done to Apple and its founders. They deserve their billions.
But why do I never feel the need to buy anything they’ve made?
Am I missing out on something? I doubt it.
I just think that little computers are brilliant. There is clearly a God: for if he didn’t want humans to so amplify their interactions that the “inter-net” is beginning to resemble a living creature, then He would not have given us scientists and engineers, and modern physics…
But….having tried to use a rather new and shiny (very thin) Apple PC the other day, at someone’s house, I’m sorry to disappoint the Macolytes. All I was doing was grabbing jpegs off the internet and trying to paste them sort of fairly nicely formatted into an open “word” document, but I didn’t find its operation or the way one has to think in order to use it fast, to be intuitive at all. I had to rely on the help of the 15-year old girly whose property it was, and even she the main user couldn’t do it.
We ended up switching to my Packard Bell cheapo PC, logging onto her wireless net, porting the doc over and re-editing it/adding all the graphics and formatting on mine, then sending it back again. My machine also seemed to run at about twice the speed of her new Apple.
Perhaps for most ordinary humble users, this debate does not matter. But strategically I am with Ian B. My problem with Apple is the oft-manifest and self-regarding-arrogance of professional Mac users, frequently in “graphics”, frequently polonecked (why is that, pray?) and frequently looking like younger glossier Steve Jobs clonoids.
Furthermore, when I go to a house and see a Mac on the table and it doesn’t belong to a guest, then the 78% probability of a Guardian-reader living there is borne out in fact. So why is that? Could it be that socialists have more money than us? Apples are surprisingly expensive for what they do.
My guess is that when Jobs finally shuffles off this mortal coil the whole company will just implode. The company is its image, and its image is just Steve Jobs’s personality. The products themselves are not particularly bad (David Davis’s points notwithstanding) but they are simply not as spectacularly good as they are credited as being; as such there is a kind of bubble mentality in operation and the exit of Jobs will be the moment it goes pop. Suddenly that little white box or average quality tablet computer will just look like it really is; the sparkle will be gone.
Bubbles occur generally when the market (for whatever reason) assigns a very high value to some commodity (mortgages, railway shares, tulips) then realises that they never were worth that much. The danger is that Job’s admittedly astonishingly powerful presence will drive the whole market into a set of commoditised walled gardens before the bubble pops. That would push us into a very dangerous place in which, for instance, people have become used to the idea that you can’t publish a book (if all books become e-books) without approval of a handful of corporations controlling closed platforms which are the only way to read them. That would leave us with less practical freedom of speech than has existed since before the printing press (even in a dictatorship, you can surreptitiously circulate paper samizdat; in an e-dictatorship, you can’t even do that).
We are at a critical historical juncture, and the simplistic “it’s fine if it’s the private sector” libertarian analysis is insufficient. Corporate bodies like Apple and Google, who are overtly progressive and openly seeking control of our lives should be treated with the utmost skepticism. For what it’s worth, I am for instance now deliberately living a Google-free life. I am but a drop in the ocean- they haven’t even noticed I’m gone of course- but I wish that people would give more thought to the fact that these corporations are not ideologically capitalists or free marketeers. They don’t just want your money. They want you.
I use both PCs and Macs and thus am not a ‘system fascist’ but this is a bit like listening to a Ford Cortina owner sneering at a Mercedes because their Cortina serves their needs adequately… ergo anyone who prefers a Mercedes is ‘a fool’
IanB, you might find this interesting:
My emphasis. Mr. Charney has form when it comes to this kind of corporatist guff.
So, class, today’s lesson is-
“A MacApple a day, keeps the debtor away!”
As someone old enough to have already been sentient when the very first IBM PC came out, I can remember just how arrogant Apple was at the time – after all, no-one would *ever* want more than 128K of memory for home use, right ?
Back then, Apple *owned* the personal computer image, having gotten into so many primary/elementary schools … well, they *thought* they owned it … and then along came the heretic IBMers … who basically said “Atsa nice !” – and sold a Technical Reference Manual and a concept of a PC made up mostly of easily-available mix-and-match OEM parts … and computer geeks were in heaven … the rest, as they say, is History …
Then IBM did it’s version of complacent, and competitive PC vendors sprang up … and Apple woke up, created hwat Apple told everyone was the *new* perfect product better than anything (*ptui*) PC-based, and again went complacent …
So the PC side woke up, and leap-frogged the Apple-side … until even Apple had to notice, so Apple brought out its then-latest perfect product …
And so on …
As has been noted, Apple tends to make subsequent perfect products as incompatible with prior perfect products as possible …
PC-side tends to make subsequent robust and useful (but not always pretty) products as up and down compatible as possible, for user convenience/eagerness/repeat business …
When nearby Mac-bigots wax particularly religious about their perfection, I usually quietly ask when Macs will be *allowed* to have a mouse that’s not just a one-button mouse … so they can proudly show how uninformed I am, since Macs have allowed more than one button mouses for at least a year or two …
Oh, the irony. Oh, the morony.
No doubt my linux box is virus-ridden, but the XP install that I wiped to make room for linux would have been perfectly okay.
What a self-serving pantload.
Macs seem to attract the same smug people as Priuses and Subaru Outbacks, here.
I’m in Vietnam right now. I have an iPad with me. As a travel gadget, it is an *amazing* device. It replaces my guidebook, my maps, my GPS, and half the other things in my rucksack, and it provides many other functions I didn’t previously have when traveling. (It doesn’t quite replace a laptop, although it might in a couple of years when there are are few more applications and it has a bit more storage). And everything works seemingly instantaneously and in an intuitive way. That Apple got a version 1.0 product this right after everyone else had failed to produce a tablet that anyone wanted to buy is amazing. I shudder to thing how good this product will be in a couple of years.
Of course, there are a whole pile of similar tablets from other manufacturers that will be available any day now, but to suggest that they would be anywhere near as good if they were not competing with Apple is absurd. (And judging by the smartphone market, they won’t quite be. I actually have an Android phone (an HTC Desire) rather than an iPhone myself, and the user interface is not quite and the build quality a little poorer than the iPad. On the other hand, the Android Phone cost half as much over the life of the contract. Many of the non-Apple tablets will, too.
The Apple visits Xerox story is largely true but has a few interesting twists. Jeff Raskin, who originated the Macintosh project at Apple, has told that some of it was about convincing Steve Jobs what the new computer needed to include. The engineers at Apple already understood some of this stuff, and arranged a tour to show it to Jobs so that he would then tell them to implement it. And some of the things that Apple were shown on that tour were more half complete demos than working prototypes – the bit where you move a window and the windows behind it are instantly redrawn, for instance. Jobs saw it, told his people that they could get it working if Xerox had, and presumably screamed at them until they did. Except that Xerox didn’t have it working. (During the development of the Macintosh, Steve Jobs said that if you don’t ship a product, what you do means nothing, and he was largely right).
Apple consistently finds product categories where there are certainly already products that exist but don’t work well enough for people to want to buy them, and produces a version that people do want to buy. The rest of the market then follows and produces products that people also want to buy.
If you don’t like what Apple does, buy a non-Apple product. There are lots of good ones out there. But competition is a good thing, and Apple is a ferocious competitor in a very good way.
I’ve been thinking, there’s got to be a hell of a market for an amusing compilation of cartoons called, “101 Uses For A Dead Mac User”.
“The danger is that Job’s admittedly astonishingly powerful presence will drive the whole market into a set of commoditised walled gardens before the bubble pops.”
Isn’t that a big-IF conjecture?
As usual, Michael Jennings’ comment is one of the sanest, as was Laird’s. I really don’t understand Ian B’s rage on this issue, but then again, not being a big techie, I have never quite understood the almost maniacal hatred that successful Silicon Valley businessmen (it is a guy thing) seem to inspire even in those who normally claim to be in favour of capitalism and free markets. What is eating people? I remember several years ago writing about Richard Branson, and the same loathing came up. It was worse than the sort of BS you see on the Guardian or the paraodies of Private Eye.
As Mike said, if Apple is so fucking awful, go and buy something else. It is not as if Steve Jobs sells his products to people while he drugs them and holds them at gunpoint.
Just as many of the great capitalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were falsely maligned as “robber barons”, the same things are being said of the entrepreneurs of today. Plus ca change…
I can understand anger at Google for their push for legislation on “quality of service” for wireless (and wired) networks – that really is something to worry about, but Macs… I don’t get it.
And… Subaru Outbacks?! What’s wrong with them? Flat four diesel engine… a tad noisy maybe but how on earth are they even remotely related to a Prius, let alone a Mac?!
Ian B said:
You don’t have to be a libertarian to sign up to this. I’ve been banging on for years about the inordinate levels of control exercised over us by large private corporations, who do everything they can to lock us in to their particular product or piece of the world. Frederick Pohl and C M Kornbluth satirised it all years ago in The Space Merchants, but that is coming closer to reality all the time.
Did you know that if you are selling on the internet and want your products listed in Google Merchant one of the words you cannot use to describe it is ‘free’? So no free shipping, no acid-free paper for printmakers or photographers. You can’t use ‘vacation’, ‘travel’, smoke, smoked, champagne, whiskey, beer, cigar, cigarette, rum, rummo, vine, vineyard, camel, brandy, gin, bordeaux, burgundy, anime, strip, stripper, adult; including hyphenated words such as adult-size, butt, sexy, affair, ale, chick, sensual, hemp, postage,Postage stamp, collecting, thorny, precious metal, muse, corsage, – and gun!
Thorny? Muse?, Travel? WTF is all that about? Can you imagine the outrage if some local authority decided to ban use of these words in some way? It isn’t better because it’s the private sector. There is for most people no viable alternative to Google Merchant. Google are exploiting their near monopoly position to impose their own obscure version of morality – and if it isn’t morality they are even more twisted than I thought.
In a different context look at the excesses of the Home Owner Associations – thou shall not dry your washing in your own back garden! Again HOAs have a near monopoly in new property developments and buyers have no effective choice.
I can’t actually get myself worked up about Apple in the same way. I do after all have a choice – which I exercise by not using or owning any Apple products. I think the iPhone is actually a brilliant product – but I refuse to be tied into the use of iTunes. I know there are ways round it, but I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to use what I have bought in the way I want to.
I thought this interesting on the way in which proprietary controls can lead to authoritarian outcomes.
http://c4ss.org/content/4108
The right to read, linked from there is interesting too:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Well, I am a little with both Ian and Brian here.
The only thing either Gates or Jobs brought to the table which other potential contenders didn’t have was the marketing and promotional nouce. And a bit of opportunity grabbing.
If those two hadn’t dominated there were twenty dozen others, who had only fractionally less skill at being in the right place at the right time, who could have, and would have, taken their places.
“…what Jobs has done in terms of improving the happiness of mankind…”
Oh, please let me guess…
Enabling a load of posers in crewneck sweaters and achingly cool trainers to sneer at those who actually make the money they spend?
Would that be about right?
In any case, to be serious, we should not thank either Gates or Jobs, either of whom would have the shirt off your back for next to nothing if they could, but rather we should thank the god of competition which keeps them rushing round the treadmill and improving their products for all of us – even architects.
Ian (B), if you tell me what’s wrong with Mozilla, I promise not to bring up Victorian Puritans. Seriously, I understand about Google, and I am partially with you on Apple, but Mozilla?
Ian (who is neither, nor): so you are saying that merchants have a god-given right to use Google Merchant? As to HOA, I think it might be different, because I suspect that government control of land and construction (zoning regulations etc.) influence the matter at least in some indirect ways.
Also, what the hell is wrong with turtlenecks, crew-necks and polo-necks?
Alisa – no I’m saying that Google have got themselves into a near monopoly position which they are now abusing.
As to HOAs they exercise a great deal more control than any zoning regs in the US – which themselves are generally much more restrictive than the UK planning system. See the book Privatopia for many more egregious examples.
Ian, let me please rephrase it then: so you are implying that merchants have a god-given right to use Google Merchant?
Alisa – are you saying/implying that when big corporates like Google misuse their monopoly power it is OK because they are private companies? That such abuse of power is not an issue unless carried out by government?
Beyond that, my only view is that companies like Google, in receipt of all sorts of state aided benefits – like Limited Company status, like tax breaks on investment, like so-called intellectual property rights – should not be able to use that state support as a means to exercise coercive power over other businesses to force them to trade in a particular way.
Let’s not forget that Steve J was also the driving force behind Pixar. Whether you like Apple or not – and I personally do – you have to admire a guy who created not one but two iconic companies. As estimated by receipts, not words.
Alisa, this is why I said the simple “it’s the private sector” analysis is insufficient. When there are only a handful of privately owned gateways, the issue of who owns them and their owners’ behaviour becomes very important, particularly because we live in a Very Big Government society in which businesses interact with the State and receive favours, and can earn brownie points (such as avoiding regulation) by certain actions.
Go back to my example of publishing books. Books don’t require a “platform”. A book is its own platform. Anyone can open a bookshop, or hand out pamphlets on the street corner. If there are only three or four e-book platforms (e.g. via the Appstore, Kindle, what have you) and they come with strict lists of what is and what is not “acceptable” you’ve got a private sector censorship operation. And in the current climate, no progressive business will be harmed- indeed they will gain kudos in the governmnet- by banning, say, “adult”, homophobia, islamophobia, sexism, climate change denial…
It’s useless anaylysing business as it currently is in a libertarian framework, because we don’t live in libertarian societies. In a libertarian polity, businesses would have no particular incentive to impose these restrictions. In a progressive polity, with most of big business controlled by overt progressives, there is a great incentive. We can’t ignore that.
Well, ian (not Ian or Ian B) has dragged me back into this discussion.
“Alisa, are you saying/implying that when big corporates like Google misuse their monopoly power it is OK because they are private companies? That such abuse of power is not an issue unless carried out by government?”
Alisa may or may not be saying/implying that (she’s perfectly capable of speaking for herself) but I am. “Misuse”? What gives you the right to make that judgment? Their company, their rules. I don’t permit smoking in my house. Is that a “misuse” of my power? And “monopoly power”? Sorry, but you don’t understand the definition of “monopoly”. A true monopoly can only exist with the support of the coercive power of government. If a private company succeeds in supplanting all its competitors, unless there was state intervention (which is certainly not the case with Google) it’s because it provided a superior product. You’re free to start a competing company, and if your service is superior, or if Google’s (admittedly daffy) rules are sufficiently annoying to its customers, you’ll succeed. Go for it. But your demand that Google conform to your ideas of what is the “proper” use of its power sounds suspiciously authoritarian.
Oh, and as to all those alleged “state-aided benefits” you cited (limited liability status, tax breaks, IP rights): guess what? They’re all available to you, too! And to all of Google’s other competitors as well. They confer no special benefit, any more than does gravity. Google has succeeded in the environment in which it found itself. That’s not a valid basis for criticism.
Laird, you put it better than I ever could.
I still remember, in 1992, needing a personal computer to perform some fairly heavy lifting with regard to database manipulation (millions of transactions, lengthy time periods, item profusion etc).
The company I’d joined used Mac (!) as their “standard”, relying on the IT department to perform all their data crunching — the results being piped to Macs which could then create beautiful charts and pretty pictures.
At the time, no Mac could peform the same tasks that I managed to get done on a 486x PC with a 500MB (!) hard drive (using Paradox 4.0 and Quattro Pro). Hell, the Macs of the time couldn’t even handle the spreadsheets I used to create data consolidation tables.
Here’s the interesting thing. I asked a Mac veteran whether today’s Mac could handle what my 486 did back then. Once I’d scoped out the size of task for him, he admitted that the Mac still couldn’t do it, without some unbelievable pre-pruning of the data and/or intuitive data manipulation.
And that’s the essential difference, I think, between the PC and the Mac.
The Mac is a boutique sports car — say, oh, a Maserati Quattroporte — which is expensive, looks beautiful, runs beautifully (most of the time) and in fairly defined settings, is impressive.
The PC platform is a Ford F-150, which is cheap, can be customized out the wazoo and can carry heavy loads.
If your gig is watching movies, playing games and doing artistic stuff, then get a Mac. If you actually have to work with your personal computer, get a PC.
Seems like that’s as true now as it was back in 1992.
Laird, you’re making the mistake of pretending you live in a libertarian world. You don’t.
Google for instance run soirees attended by politicians, business leaders, opinion formers etc. Why do you think they do that? To share their holiday snaps? Swap recipes?
Or consider that Sony, Kyocera and other corporations actively supported 10:10 and proudly declare their continued commitment to “zero carbon”. Why do they do that? Well, maybe their CEOs are mad about Green. But also, by “being Green” they can have government shine benignly on them in terms of regulation.
These major corporations are directly and indirectly entwined in government/governance, and it is phenomenally naive to halt one’s analysis at the simplistic “they can do as they wish” level.
The anglo-socialist model of “markets” is to concentrate market power in a small number of huge companies who take tea with ministers. Why do you think that is?
Well, a PC can do all them now, and Macs have never had many games available; the PC has always been the gaming “PC”. I think that goes back to my earlier point that although the evolution of interfaces was slower on the PC platform, it tracked the capabilities of hardware better; the Mac’s GUI was too much, too early. An old PC running DOS has all its processor horsepower available for raw processing and all the hardware available to the programmer for doing odd stuff that a complex OS couldn’t handle at the time. I used to do some machine code PC programming, and you’ve got a basically bare machine to work with; you don’t need DOS at all if you want to bypass it for speed and efficiency. Hence the ability for all those games in DOS to run on the relatively low power x86 processors at the time. Once PC hardware was good enough to run games under the more complex GUI OS, that happened.
I think it comes back to that Jobs mindset. It’s “I have decided what this machine is for, and that is all you will be able to do with it. You don’t need to do anything else”. The obvious example is the Lisa which preceeded the Mac; there was no software available at all for it other than the suite supplied with it; you couldn’t even develop on the Lisa OS. Period. Why would you want to? Steve has provided everything you need! Like I keep saying, he’s a classic Proggie authoritarian. He knows what you want, and if you don’t agree you’re the one making the mistake.
Taking tea with ministers is a real problem Ian, I absolutely agree. Seems to me you have three possible approaches: eliminate companies, eliminate tea or eliminate ministers. You have chosen to eliminate companies, which is easier to do, seeing as many ministers are at it anyway – so we may as well help them out, right? Might eliminate tea as well, because pretty soon there will be no one left to produce it anyway.
And a small shout out to Steve Wozniak. The Woz!
NB: i’m a committed PC user with an android phone.
Alisa, no, I’m just saying that we should not consider these companies in the current real socio-economic climate to be benign. They have enormous influence over our lives and act as part of the State. I would dearly love to eliminate ministers. The probability of that in the near future seems remote.
That’s what I’m saying: you are looking for your keys under the lamppost – that’s what all the populists in the governments and the media are doing, and you are joining them.
I’m not quite sure what you mean Alisa. Governments and media (in particular) seem to me to be very fond of Apple and Google etc.
?
Politicians and media are very fond of laying all of the world’s problems at the feet of evil businessmen. Media aside for being fickle, where do you see governments’ fondness of Apple and Google?
This seems to be turning into one of those “the sky is blue? Can you prove that? It doesn’t look blue to me!” arguments.
Good night, Ian:-)
Kim, to be relatively polite, that is complete bollocks. The Mac has a proper BSD Unix system running underneath the flashy surface, and for anything computationally intensive or requiring large scale manipulation, the Mac today is much better and much more robust than anything running on the slightly creaky sort of VMS but not quite underpinnings of modern Windows. If you look at the high-end Mac Pros, they have extremely high level specs. This is because Apple has taken a fair portion of the high end workstation market that used to be dominated by companies like Sun, HP, and DEC. That market seems to have split – environments with money to burn (eg Hollywood) tend to use Apple gear, whereas those that don’t have switched to running Linux on commodity hardware, but Windows is not an option I would go anywhere near for such a task.
Jobs was notthe driving force behind Pixar
I am a software engineer, so I have a dog in the mac vs pc fight, or, rather I used to have one. Modern operating systems and software development tools have rendered the question of which hardware/OS combo you use, irrelevant to most tasks at hand. For example, at this moment, I am running a server application on a linux box in some never-visited bunker, which models a world in 3D, in real-time, and allows users to completely create all their own content on this world (see Opensimulator.org). This application was developed mostly on Windows, and the executables run with excellent performance, even through the compatibility software (Mono), and have been doing so non-stop for at least 8 months. No reboots. No crashes.
The platform doesnt matter.
There’s a lot of emotion about Apple being displayed here, which is in my opinion a bit extreme. Apple has billions in reserve because they have successfully marketed products that enough people want. Remember: Apple is a hardware company that happens to write some amazing software to enable sales of said hardware. iTunes is a means to an end for Apple, and that end is more iPod sales.
It really doesnt matter whether you adore or despise Jobs; it doesnt matter whether Steve’s Unreality Bubble dies with him or not; what matters in the context of this topic is that he has driven the creation of products which people buy.
I cant find it now, but a technology commentator that I read quite a bit (Cringley) claims he still has a cassette tape of an interview he did with Bill Gates, wherein the topic came around to Apple and Steve Jobs, both of whom were down and out at the time. Gates muttered something like, ‘why doesnt he just give up?’
Well, Jobs didnt give up, thank you very much, and here we are, with Apple enjoying its well-deserved market position. I am no particular fan of Apple, their products, or their freedom-hating terms of use policies, but, they are a healthy survivor in a battlefield littered with rotting corpses. I admire the company for that reason, if not for the fact that betting against Jobs is about as foolish as betting against Director James Cameron.
What t’other Ian said.
In the US they’re typically gasoline V6, not diesel. Diesel passenger cars are unheard-of here for reasons that are beyond the scope of this thread.
The reason for my comment was because, in this particular area, Outbacks attract the same sort of trendy-lefty douchebags as the Pious.
As for someone’s HOA comment: HOA boards attract the sort of self-important control freaks that don’t have the charisma needed to work at the department of motor vehicles.
Apples Mantra for consumer goods is to take an already existing good idea, give it a an apple aesthetic and then market the almighty hell out of it. There real expertise is selling. At this point they have managed to gather such a critical mass of followers that they could paint a halfbrick white, give it chrome accents and market is as the iBrick Designer Paperweight and sell one million a month.
That brand is a license to print money right now.
There were always (at least) two sides to Bill Gates – the businessman (and, let us be fair, Gates was a incredible businessman – even if he actually did not develop the softwear that made his fortune, his gaining control of it and selling to major corporations showed genius) and the politician.
Politician because he has long had the habit of lecturing people on political matters (do ……….) in the expectation that people would take his opinions in the way they take his cheques.
Whilst he was talking about his own money I supose that was fair – “yes Mr Gates I quite agree with your political opinions – now give me some more money to save those starving people over here”.
However, it is more and more other people’s money now – like his father Mr Gates is a big inheritance tax man (if you want to give your money away – but do not FORCE other people to give the money they have worked for their whole lives to Barack Obama, rather than their own children), and now he pushing an income tax for Washington State (as he has pushed so many other harmful political ideas before).
“But he is still a great business man Paul” – actually he seems to have given up business.
Mr Jobs still runs his company – but Mr Gates can no longer be bothered (he never really was an inventor – he was a businessman, and now he is not that).
“That is his choice” – I quite agree, but I wish the man would just give away his money and sit on a beach somewhere (“looking for himself” or whatever) then we would no longer have to hear from him.