Wozniak calls for open Apple

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/300704,wozniak-calls-for-open-apple.aspx

by jacobr • 14 years ago

188 149 14 years ago

itnews.com.au

I think Apple can be more open and be just as successful. I don't think they can be as open as Wozniak wants and still be successful.

Apple's biggest strength to me is timing and execution. They didn't invent the tablet, but they made it better and at a time when more people were ready for it.

I think the time is coming that being more open will be an advantage. Right now controlling your entire experience (to me) produces better products. I think Apple will patiently wait for the time and likely execute it correctly.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 14 years ago

It depends on the context of `open`.

Should Apple relax restrictions on the app store, sure. However then quality may dip or so users are told.

Should Apple open source more technologies, sure. However it comes with a cost, such as documentation efforts and etc.

Both of these problems are in the critical path of timing & execution. So I highly doubt Apple will do anything.

The Woz has always pushed for an open Apple, and damnit I wish he had it, but I doubt it from happening.

rbanffy3• 14 years ago

> I don't think they can be as open as Wozniak wants and still be successful.

I don't think they could make the existing product lines more open, but they could explore the idea of a developer version of the iPad. Sure someone would find a way to download music or copying installed software without paying, but I don't think that would be even measurable.

I'd love if it came in beige, with a rainbow logo ;-)

gaelian• 14 years ago

> Apple's biggest strength to me is timing and execution. They didn't invent the tablet, but they made it better and at a time when more people were ready for it.

Kind of the similar to what happened with their implementation of the mouse and the MP3 player, they didn't invent these things, but they improved upon them or made them more accessible to consumers at the right time. But I am really keen to see if Apple can continue this pattern without Jobs at the helm.

loverobots• 14 years ago

"I think that Apple could be just as strong and good and be open, but how can you challenge it when a company is making that much money?"

I think he knows it well. Like it or not Apple is AAPL, or there to make money for shareholders. Would "being open" result in more money for the people that bought a tiny slice of a $500 Billion pie? Will any CEO try when they're making $50 Billion or whatever they're making this year in profit? Not sure

MattGrommes• 14 years ago

Having the extra slots on the Apple ][ allowed for there to be more uses of Apple's computer, and almost certainly led to more profit. It also did no damage since you couldn't use the slots to do anything to the computer that would cost Apple money. If Apple opened up, say, the licensing on the adapter plug on the bottom of iPads and iPhones, that would do just what Woz is talking about with the only impact to their bottom line being the licensing revenue for the plug. It would also allow more uses of their devices. I think there's plenty of places they could "open up" and still keep their river of money flowing in.

swedenborg7• 14 years ago

Apple was hope . now its the new MS ...

comes with the territory . if you the one and in bed with CIA who's to say open up ...

ghost91• 14 years ago

At the momenent, Apple is even worse than Microsoft.

fjarlq• 14 years ago

How?

gouranga• 14 years ago

DEC is the new Unisys.

IBM is the new DEC.

Microsoft is the new IBM.

Apple is the new Microsoft.

Linux is the new... err ahh...

BSD is the new.. err umm...

Screw opening corporations. Break the cycle entirely I say.

rbanffy3• 14 years ago

You forgot one: Java is the new COBOL.

Now, more seriously, such cycles do exist and we can observe them easily. History repeats imperfectly in subtly different ways. If Apple is to be the new Microsoft, it won't be exactly like it just as Microsoft is not exactly the new IBM - both have learned from their predecessors. Will they make mistakes that doom themselves? Eventually yes, but they won't be the same mistakes that doomed their predecessors.

jacquesm• 14 years ago

I absolutely love Steve Wozniak for stuff like this, he's everything I could ever dream of being.

At the same time that lovely naivete about what would happen is exactly why this will never fly.

Apple is the golden goose and nobody will sign off on a risky move that might kill the goose or stop it from laying those golden eggs. If there is one thing that makes CEO's conservative it is very large streams of income. You can take risks when you're small.

If 'the Woz' wants to have a more open platform comparable with Apple then I'm pretty sure he'd find tons of people willing to follow him if he decided to go down that road himself. What will happen is that sooner or later he'll need a business guy to take care of all of those non-technical details and at some point in time after that we'd have a new Apple, just as bad as the old.

swedenborg7• 14 years ago

true

Q: is that human nature or indoctrination of democracy at play ...

rbanffy3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure.

Apple has been faithful to its principles since Jobs returned - to offer a few products, not to compete in features and to provide a seamless experience. It's successful because its clients like it that way.

I don't think Woz has as many fans as Jobs had, but I still suspect the "tablet ][" is yet to be invented.

alecco• 14 years ago

Apple can try with something small. They use a lot of open source.

On the other hand, they can learn from others. Android/Google is catching on Apple due in part to a mostly open platform.

swedenborg7• 14 years ago

call to arms : Woz a new "next" ... maybe start back where http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS left !

treetrouble• 14 years ago

Haiku http://haiku-os.org

swedenborg7• 14 years ago

WozOS : hey we are here ...

need to find a hardware model is all . because software is not paying alone . Apple now gives a free OS with proprietary hardware ... all is well ...

oldschooltaper2• 14 years ago

What would he say to the idea of selling Apple hardware without tying it to an OS?

In other words, you can buy the great Apple form factor and design, but you don't have to deal with the restrictions of the OS. You could install your own OS.

Obviously this would initially only target hackers. NetBSD can run on some Apple hardware. And there is all the Hackintosh work to build on. Eventually there would be more free OS offerings to install after giving the hacker community some time to adjust to the newfound freedom.

Apple could even sell OSX and iOS separately.

There is a lot of value just in the Apple hardware. Even without the Apple OS offerings. Apple is primarily a hardware company.

myko2• 14 years ago

This is already possible though. Or you mean just purchasing the hardware with no OS on it to start; which would be a savings of $30?

sukuriant• 14 years ago

Don't kid yourself. Some of the high price of an Apple computer includes the real price of the operating system, which is far more than $30. It also includes the majority of the price for upgrades. Apple computers are not worth $2000 in parts. A lot of that money is R&D.

userdeveloper6• 14 years ago

The purpose may not be to save money. The purpose may be to have flexibility. To install only what the user wants to install. Maybe the user does not want OSX preinstalled on the HDD. Maybe the user wants to boot diskless with a blank HDD only used for storage or something else, but not the OS.* The point is that it allows more flexibility. Let the user decide what she wants to install. Sell the user the hardware. Charge whatever you want. Then stay out of the user's business. How she uses the hardware is her business.

*There are some real security benefits from keeping the OS on read-only media.

maz29• 14 years ago

I always wondered what would happen if someone leaked the source code to OSX or iOS. Would the forked versions outshine new releases? In my opinion normal users would prefer apple's versions while hackers would take the other route for greater flexibility. Maybe Woz should anonymously leak iOS 4 or OSX 10.4 source. Apple wouldn't have to worry about maintaining documentation and it would also give them a nice buffer to outshine any competition.

swedenborg7• 14 years ago

it is not only source code . its moral & ethics at play ...

sbuk• 14 years ago

You do realise that a large portion of OSX/iOS is open? The closed portions of the os are mainly the GUI layer. See for yourself; http://opensource.apple.com and http://www.puredarwin.org/

rogerbinns7• 14 years ago

Here is a nice comparison. Buy a mobile device and try to use the standard developer tools to put Hello World on it.

Android: Download Eclipse (Windows, Linux or Mac) and the Android SDK (Windows, Linux or Mac) - no accounts or registration needed for either of these. In your phone menus enable development and connect via USB. In Eclipse make your hello world project, and hit Run or Debug. Enjoy.

Apple: You must buy a Mac. In the App Store (requires an account) or the developer site (requires an account and registration) download Xcode. Create your project. Connect the phone via USB. Right click to enable it for development and then do some song and dance with Apple to get permission to use "your" device for development. (I haven't yet worked out the exact dance required and how much it costs.)

I don't know what it looks like for WP7 but assume it is substantially similar to Apple.

Rudism• 14 years ago

The Apple song and dance involves creating developer certificates, project-specific code-signing certs, installing them all on your Mac and your device, and then setting up XCode to use the correct certificate combinations for the correct projects in the correct environments when signing the code (I can't say for certain how this all works because I basically trial-and-errored it until it miraculously started working). It is free (with your account) as long as you don't want to distribute your application on the app store, or even use it on your own device without having to renew your code-signing certificates every few months. Otherwise it's $100/year.

rogerbinns7• 14 years ago

I still haven't figured out how to do the song and dance. (All I want to do is run hello world on "my" device.) You eventually end up at this technical note, which of course leaves out any links:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#technotes/tn2250/_in...

How I become a team (of one) admin, or where to find this "iOS Provisioning Portal" are of course left out.

LinXitoW• 14 years ago

I had to learn Objective-C, how to use a Mac and Xcode inside of a month, because the company we normally outsourced this kind of development to didn't have time.

Never in my wildest dreams would I've guessed that the actual programming would be the easiest part.

oldschooltaper2• 14 years ago

Precisely. Apple is all about hoop jumping.

Remember your first iPod?

Chances are you were forced to use something called iTunes. Now people do not think twice about iTunes.

But back then there was just no sensible reason, from the user's perspective, not to let a user add/remove music from an iPod without jumping through an additional hoop. People had to spend countless hours deciphering the protocol in order to build programs that could do what iTunes did: add/remove music.

Out of the box, the iPod was literally unusable without first installing some Apple software.

No matter how wonderful the design of an Apple device, the hoop jumping just becomes increasingly tiresome. I'm too tired to do the Apple dance.

Tloewald6• 14 years ago

The alternative at the time was to buy an mp3 player with no way for normal people to load or buy music. It's precisely because of the lack of hoop jumping that iPod took off. Don't confuse the customer experience with the developer experience. Apple has always considered ease of use for end users a top priority and ease of use for programmers to be a distant nth.

userdeveloper6• 14 years ago

s/protocol/database format/

swedenborg7• 14 years ago

yeah . in WozOS it cost 10 or whatever he says ... only ...

Tloewald6• 14 years ago

Installing xcode is staggeringly more pleasant than installing eclipse in my experience. The developer certificate song and dance is a total pain in the butt, but note that you can test and build your hello world for iOS without a device at all, no hoops to jump, and it works really well.

myko2• 14 years ago

Really? The App Store makes Xcode installs fairly easy (though upgrading from pre-App Store Xcode breaks things in my experience), but what could be simpler than downloading Eclipse's zip, and then unzipping it?

Or do you mean it's a pain setting up the Android SDK within Eclipse? This could certainly be more stream lined (though I think it's fairly simple to setup as well).

bad_user6• 14 years ago

     Installing xcode is staggeringly more pleasant
     than installing eclipse in my experience

People saying that don't really know what they are talking about. Installing Eclipse involves these steps:

1) install Java, which on my Ubuntu is just "sudo aptitude install openjdk-6-jdk" and that's it

2) download an archive from Eclipse.org and unzip it somewhere

3) there is no step 3

Installing the Android plugin is equally easy. Then there's always IntelliJ IDEA which is probably the best IDE and comes with Android integration built in. The community version was recently open-sourced too.

wluu• 14 years ago

For WP7:

- Download the SDK (free), which includes Visual Studio (For Windows Phone) Express IDE. It also includes an emulator tool. http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started Obviously only runs on Windows. - To deploy to your phone, you'll need to become an app hub member ($99 per year). Or there's numerous ways to unlock your phone for app deployment (if you search hard enough). And then you can just deploy from within Visual Studio to a USB connected device. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff928362(v=vs.92).as...

There's probably more to it, but I personally have yet to deploy a WP7 app to a device. I've written a few test apps though.

Also, found this blog (first in a series of a few) that attempts to develop an app using Visual Studio (for WP7 dev), Mono Touch (for iOS dev) and Mono Droid (for uh, Android dev)... Might be of interested to some: http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2011/04/04/Windo... And the rest of his articles are easier to get to via the archives - http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/archive.aspx#Mobile

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

WP is utterly painless re: deployment; plug it in, give it a dev certificate (automated, you only sign in to apphub), and hit run from MSVS.

What I was more impressed with, they handle signing your xap for release as well; it's all automatic (slightly less so on Android, much less so on iOS).

daliusd• 14 years ago

I would add: born in right country OR be prepared to do that in other complicated ways.

rsiqueira• 14 years ago

The original Woz's Apple II was by default optimized for developers, just boot the computer (about 1 second to boot) and type:

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

RUN

jinushaun• 14 years ago

I hate when people list "buy a mac" as the first step for iOS development. Some of us already have one. In order to develop for Eclipse, I'd have to buy/own a computer as well.

hristov• 14 years ago

And some of us don't. It is presumed that you need a computer to run an IDE, but it is not presumed that you need a Mac. So saying that you need to have Mac to do something is quite an informative statement.

saintfiends• 14 years ago

Could you elaborate a better first step?

bad_user6• 14 years ago

I own 5 personal computers, out of which 3 are desktops and 2 are laptops, with 2 of them running Windows, 2 Ubuntu and 1 of them Mac OS X.

Eclipse and Java work on all 5 computers. XCode works on only one. And because that OS X machine is a desktop, I barely ever use it, which is why I bought an Android instead of an iPhone.

zanny• 14 years ago

Do note they are working on IDE's for Android itself that would let you make apps on the device without the need for a secondary system.

grannyg00se• 14 years ago

You (ahem) forgot Blackberry.

It has been a while for me but from what I can recall you are ready to go once you download the blackberry IDE. There may be an eclipse plugin for that now so you don't have to download the whole monster.

rogerbinns7• 14 years ago

I didn't forget Blackberry. I tried to develop for it in the past. There were a never ending series of downloads. You had to keep registering, repeatedly filling in the same detailed information before they begrudgingly handed over anything. After filling up my machine with bloatware I was unable to even get hello world to appear in an emulator. The chance of getting anything on my device was zero, and they required all sorts of extra certificates and payment to use any of the useful APIs.

This whole process is part of RIM's DNA. A year ago when they were doing the whole Playbook thing it repeated: http://blog.jamiemurai.com/2011/02/you-win-rim/

Quite frankly I know many former Blackberry users but I don't know a single current one. I have no idea why anyone would even consider the platform.

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

I've never quite understood why they require a Mac for development. Surely it wouldn't be insurmountable to port the tools to Windows/Linux?

They might sell a few more Mac desktops this way but I can't see it being a large number in the grand scheme of things.

One of the reasons I bought an Android instead of an iPhone was because I can develop for it using the computer I already have.

ricardobeat6• 14 years ago

Porting XCode and emulators to windows/linux is probably a huge undertaking, the technology stack is completely different. In addition, the cost of a Mac for development ($599 for a mini) is not stopping anybody, and most iOS developers will already have one, so there's little return to be had.

peterkelly5• 14 years ago

The reason a mac is required for development is that iOS and OS X are essentially the same operating system - they just have different user interfaces. When you run your app under the iOS "simulator", it is actually running as a native OS X app, linked against a version the iOS user interface libraries that have been compiled for OS X.

For Apple to support development on other platforms, as far as I can see the only practical option would be to provide an alternative to the simulator which runs a variant of iOS inside a virtual machine. While this is certainly technically feasible to do, and you could make the argument that they should provide such a tool, it does involve a lot more than simply porting a few user-space tools to run on a different OS. Android also benefits in this regard from using Java, which already has compilers available for all major platforms.

It is also worth nothing that the Android emulator, at least last time I checked, is extremely slow to the point of being unusable. When I was developing for Android I found the only realistic option was for me to test on a real device. The speed of the iOS simulator is one of the main things I prefer about iOS development in comparison to Android.

ricardobeat6• 14 years ago

That's a brutal over-simplification of what you need before developing for Android. "Downloading the Android SDK" is actually a dozen steps of installs, updates, add-ons, setting up emulator devices and so on.

The Apple dance takes a couple minutes to do and costs $99/year.

bad_user6• 14 years ago

     "Downloading the Android SDK" is actually a dozen
     steps of installs, updates, add-ons, setting up 
     emulator devices and so on.

That's not true. The first time I did it, it took me something like 10 minutes. I must say that I was already familiar enough with Eclipse to install the plugin without much struggling (though it can't get any easier, unless it came built-in). Beginners should also try out IntelliJ IDEA which comes with Android integration built-in.

     The Apple dance takes a couple minutes to 
     do and costs $99/year.

That's also not true. It took me somewhere between 2 and 3 hours. And you don't have to pay $99 for getting the Hello World on your phone, but you do have to fuck around with certificates for signing the binary and you also have to read a lot of documentation.

gnufied2• 14 years ago

Ahem, if you are registering from something like India. You will have to fax some documents to them for review. There is no option to even pay online. In fact, this song and dance is so time consuming that, I haven't bothered to register an account myself.

vetinari3• 14 years ago

"Downloading the Android SDK" is actually not a dozen steps of installs and updates.

It involves downloading one archive, unpacking it, running the SDK manager, checking checkboxes for target platforms you want to develop for and waiting for a couple of minutes, until it downloads. You can also set-up emulator devices for the different platforms.

That's quite a short of complications you speak of.

rogerbinns7• 14 years ago

You are right that joining Eclipse and the Android SDK is not as seamless as it should be. Technically you don't need Eclipse and the SDK can create Hello World for you in addition to building and deploying it. (Another minor difference I noticed between Android and Xcode/iOS is that a auto-created Android project printed "hello project" on the screen while the iOS one was blank.)

These are the Android SDK instructions, and each step can point to multiple others: http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html

As for the Apple dance, can you point me to the URL or actual documentation I can follow to get all the certificates, admin and whatever else it wants? All I can find is doc saying I need to do it, but nothing saying how to do it!

megablast2• 14 years ago

If you are using the simulator, you also need to setup that separately in a complicated process, and then it runs damn slow. YOu need to match versions as well. I had an old eclipse, and there was no warning, but I could not get the newer android sdks.

Apple have it right once you have installed xcode. And if you only want to run in the simulator, you do not need to worry about certs.

They both could improve, but are also light years ahead of BB.

54mf• 14 years ago

Yeah, it was significantly more difficult to set up an Android dev environment than it was to get Xcode working. Not to mention, the Android SDK is actually a ton of different SDKs for every possible version of the OS, with a bunch of device-specific SDKs on top of those.

Don't even get me started on emulators. AVD Manager is a joke.

glenra• 14 years ago

> The Apple dance takes a couple minutes to do

You either got lucky or did the Apple dance a lot more recently than some of us. When I did the Apple dance, I had to wait more than a month before my application to be a developer was "approved", then it took weeks to figure out how to get the certificate stuff working. Even after I got it working it was fragile - my ability to put an app on the phone was never something I could expect would just work - it would spontaneously break with a cryptic error for no apparent reason.

nl• 14 years ago

If you think the Apple dance is bad for getting an app on your own phone, try distributing for beta testing!

People have written Apps to help you work around how difficult it is (eg TestFlight), but even then your beta testers have to download & sign up for some random 3rd party app, then request your app just to be able to test it. Compare that to Android: enable 3rd party apps via the settings menu, then email them the app.

anextio3• 14 years ago

You should still be using something like TestFlight. Emailing builds arounds is nice but reaches critical levels of headache after the 5th or so beta.

dave1010uk• 14 years ago

Maemo (as used on the Nokia N900) :

    On the device, tap the menu button, then tap "Xterm"
    Type in 'nano helloworld.py'
    Enter the text 'print "Hello, World!"'
    Ctrl-x, ctrl-s to save the file
    Enter 'python helloworld.py' and press enter

Of course, as Maemo is based on Debian, you can easily install Ruby, PHP or even a C compiler.

nickik• 14 years ago

To bad nokia is fucking stupid, they had pure gold there.

WickyNilliams• 14 years ago

Android:

    Download AIDE from play market
    Enable apps from untrusted sources
    Start coding
    Run your app!

AIDE really is a fantastic achievement, i had a play about with it when my laptop died a few weeks back and i was itching for some coding! It's a fully-fledged development environment with code completion, refactoring and many other cool features. Something surreal about writing android apps on an android device!

swedenborg7• 14 years ago

Apple is the Finder upon a os ...

one man TOG : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini another : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman

se the finder has a redundancy slowness to mimic human perception built in ...

freehunter5• 14 years ago

I literally have no idea what you just said.

vegas• 14 years ago

The actual video interview wherein wozniak speaks with his own larynx is at http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-10/apple-co-founder-refle...

bitwize2• 14 years ago

Not gonna happen.

Apple devices are abstractions with well-defined interfaces (sets of operations you can perform on them). Not only should the implementation not matter, it is anathema that anyone should know the implementation because that would break the abstraction at a fundamental level.

It's absurd for a bunch of hackers to think about, but this is what has made Apple billions of dollars, and it's what made them the best technology company on the planet: the construction of devices completely defined by their simple interfaces, with all else hidden from the end user.

primecommenter• 14 years ago

This is nonsense. It's absurd for you to argue that the difficulty of writing "Hello world" on an Apple device is somehow a good thing for Apple or anyone else on the basis of a wishy-washy concept like "abstraction".

bitwize2• 14 years ago

It used to be effectively impossible for anyone outside Apple to develop anything for the iPhone.

The device was still a zillion seller.

mrpsbrk• 14 years ago

Alas, not gonna happen indeed.

I once believed that BSD with an Apple interface was the Utopia of computing, but no. And it took me a couple of years to understand why. I came up with a different way to say the same thing: Apple is about productizing computing ideas. But it does mean closing them down. A product is not a platform. And Xcode is just a nuisance to Apple, a requisite rather than a goal.

Sometimes productizing means making the same thing much cheaper, like their first mouse. Sometimes it is making the same thing much more expensive than necessary, like present Macs.

But the common thread is to upsell your costumer. To make him come back. This is all Apple is about. It has the advantage of pampering a prized costumer, but it has the disadvantage of locking you.

To the people saying Apple is the new MicroSoft, at first Apple was the one and only personal computer company. It used to be king of the hill. It was busted when the open-ness of the IBM PC turned out to incur cluster effects.

For all we know, this post-PC era can also witness a similar disruption. esr really thinks Android is already doing it. Lets hope.

But Apple can't do open. It is not that it would "diminish returns". It is that it goes against the very company strategy. It is cute that Woz prefers not to acknowledge it, but that is all.

orangecat• 14 years ago

Then you would agree that Macs are unsuitable for normal users, since they ship with a command line and lots of geeky Unix tools preinstalled?

userdeveloper6• 14 years ago

The true simplicity actually lies below those abstractions.

It seems reasonable to assume that people would not buy Apple products if they were too difficult to use.

It seems reasonable to assume people do not buy them for ease of use. Other competing systems are also easy to use. It seems reasonable to assume they buy them because they "look cool", much more so than any competing product.

It seems reasonable to assume the initial attraction to Apple products is the hardware design, not the software.

But none of this can be proved or disproved unless Apple were to unbundle the two and hackers were allowed to write software to run on the bare metal, not necessarily on top of Apple's development platform.

If Apple is afraid to try this then it shows they have something to fear. It shows they feel the need to exercise command and control over how users use Apple computers.

Apparently Apple's hardware design patents are not enough.

parasubvert• 14 years ago

Things can seem reasonable and not be true.

Lots of hackers continue to use Apple laptops because the software and hardware has combined what they perceive as the best quality in the industry. They don't do this because they look cool.

One can't also assume the iPad is the only runaway tablet success because of a cool factor or hardware design. The iPad was laughed at on first release by most geeks and pundits. But then people got to using one and found it more useable than a laptop for many daily tasks.

One also can't look at the iPhone margins without noting the key differentiator: iOS and iOS Apps. Software, in other words.

All companies have something to fear - they're in a competitive business. Apple just seems to be better at it than most (this generation).

kevinchen• 14 years ago

Woz was never very good with the user experience / selling things to non-experts side of things.

Derbasti2• 14 years ago

The sad truth is, if Apple were a private company, they could do this. Being a publicly traded company, their first responsibility is their shareholders. Hence, they can not indulge in good-heartedness just for the sake of it if there is even a slight chance that it won't bring in money.

This is the big big problem with the stock market.

anextio3• 14 years ago

That's a fairly common meme and a complete misunderstanding of the motives of corporations.

Companies do lots of things that don't immediately look like profit-gaining moves to investors.

Actually, put another way, do you think that Google is not a corporation, and instead a basket of goodwill, since they market things as 'open'?

Derbasti2• 14 years ago

No, but then I don't think that Google is a basket of goodwill. Quite the contrary, actually.

chj• 14 years ago

We need a young Woz to deliver a new "Apple II" tablet. No need to beg for Big Brother's mercy.

Loic• 14 years ago

This would be a cultural change, a big one. Jobs said many times he considered his products as perfect and was against the ability to be able to open them (hardware and software). This obsession not to be able to open the system extended even to the new Apple building which is designed without any opening windows. You can see that everywhere in the Apple products.

This is the philosophy of Steve Jobs, he even said he did not want to go through surgery first because he did not wanted to be "opened".

This is really interesting, in fact, these points are the ones I found the most interesting in all the media frenzy we got after his death.

ezolotko• 14 years ago

1. Make the things cost nothing, and you will lost the simple value of the thing. The value of the things comes with people caring about it. The simplest way to make people care about something is money.

2. Make the AppStore open and censorship-free and half of the apps will not be able to launch.

3. You need to get rid of script kiddies and lovers of fun and former middle-tier managers and game magazine review writers etc etc to have something that is close to a quality thing. Behold: native development and steep learning curve.

So, keep talking.

bobsy• 14 years ago

A big part of Apples success has been its closed platforms.

Would the devices be as compact and look good if they had a bunch of removable slots in the back? No.. no they wouldn't.

The thing that differentiates Apple from everyone else is that they make simple, classy products which are easy to use. If Apple open up they move into competition with the likes of Dell. This is something they simply don't need to do.

I recently switched back to Windows and the difference! My Windows computer came with a list of dos and don'ts. If I want to keep my warrenty intact I need to keep the box. I shouldn't smoke around it. I should do a yearly inspection to check for dust build ups! With a Mac you plonk it on the table, attach your mouse and keyboard and off you go. I was messing around with cables for ages with my Windows computer.

Look at Apple now. Jobs was right, Woz was wrong. Would it be nice if Apple products were more open? HELL YES! Should Apple do it? No... because then they loose a big chunk of what makes Apple, Apple.

xutopia• 14 years ago

He's so naive it is adorable.

roc• 14 years ago

Open Apple is a description of a fundamentally different company. Apple does do a bit with open source and could do quite a bit more without problems.

But what "Open Apple" implies, are things like an "Open" specification for the Dock Connector. And "Open" specifications that invite vendors to write their own device drivers to handle those accessories.

And that's an invitation for third parties to sell crap accessories with buggy or broken drivers and generally annoy the hell out of users who are currently paying Apple a premium to not be annoyed.

Similarly with services. "Open" the specification, allow the world in, and you get crap and esoteric support problems.

Again: things that people pay Apple a premium to not suffer.

And none of this is to say Apple is perfect, or their way is better. They make their mistakes, but they believe they're the right people to fix them. And they naturally support fewer devices, fewer services and fewer use cases. So it's far from appropriate for everybody. But it's damn sure appropriate for Apple's customers.

Woz's statement reads like a musing from someone who doesn't understand why the best of intentions don't always become the best of manifestations.

If you Open Apple, they'll get new, different customers. And lose all the old ones.

Wozniak calls for open Apple

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