What the Ipad means

Ev­ery­thing I will say here was prob­a­bly bet­ter said by Mark Pil­grim but what the heck, let's give it a shot.

Here's what's wrong with the iPad: it sucks for me.

Be­fore any­one says "don't buy it then!" I'll say it first: I don't in­tend to buy one.

I think there is a place for iPads and it would go agains most of my be­liefs to say it should­n't ex­ist, but I al­so ex­pect it to make our world poor­er, if it's pop­u­lar enough.

Yes it's hos­tile to tin­ker­ing. Yes, to read about that, see Mark Pil­grim's ar­ti­cle, he's a much bet­ter writ­er than I.

I once post­ed the README file for a piece of soft­ware called At­last. It said things like "make ev­ery­thing pro­grammable" and "[It is] far bet­ter to in­vest the ef­fort up front to cre­ate a prod­uct flex­i­ble enough to be adapt­ed at will, by its user­s, to their im­me­di­ate need­s."

The iPad and most oth­er Ap­ple prod­ucts are the an­tithe­sis of that. They are prod­ucts meant to be ex­act­ly as they are, and that's all they are goint to be. If you want to change the way it act­s, you need to pay and be sub­ject of Ap­ple's whim, or "break in­to" your own de­vice.

That hurts me. I see peo­ple give up even the pos­si­bil­i­ty of chang­ing what a (let's say it) pret­ty, use­ful, pow­er­ful de­vice is ca­pa­ble of, just be­cause they don't what that free­dom. I can un­der­stand that from, say, a used car sales­man, or what­ev­er, some­one with­out any in­cli­na­tion for that craft.

But I see freak­ing pro­gram­mers buy­ing ap­ple kit. And I see them hap­py with their iPhones and iPods and (soon, sure­ly) iPad­s, buy­ing apps from the on­ly source en­abled to sell them, buy­ing the apps that are al­lowed by a sin­gle par­ty, that de­cides, hey, this ap­p? you won't need it!

I see them and I say to my­self, dude, that thing you hold in your hand is more pow­er­ful than any­thing we had 10 years ago, there must be some­thing cool you could do with it that noone else is do­ing.

What's the vi­sion a pro­gram­mer has of his fu­ture if he en­dors­es Ap­ple's closed kit? A fu­ture where he can pro­gram some­thing on­ly if Ap­ple ap­proves? A fu­ture where a "re­al" com­put­er is a SDK for the things "re­al peo­ple" use in their ev­ery­day lifes?

What is wrong with you? What hap­pened to you? Are you now the kind of guy that's just hap­py with what he's given? Are you now a freak­ing util­i­tar­i­an? Are you old now?

Have you no­ticed the trend in Ap­ple's new prod­ucts is to­wards less con­trol by the user? First it was just hand­held­s, now there's a tablet. What was the last new in­ter­est­ing Ap­ple prod­uct that was­n't locked up?

Here they had a de­vice which could have OSX or Iphone OS, and they went with Iphone OS. There is a rea­son for that: it makes them more mon­ey.

For OS­X, they make mon­ey of the hard­ware, the OS up­grades, and some app­s. On the iPad, they make mon­ey ev­ery time you buy any ap­p, ev­ery time you buy a book to read in it, ev­ery time you use 3G with the pre­paid plan, and I am sure they are go­ing to find oth­er ways too.

And what's the key to mak­ing mon­ey that way? Con­trol. If they had no ex­clu­sive con­trol of the App store, they lose a source of rev­enue. If they al­lowed for easy de­vel­op­ment of hob­by app­s, they would lose rev­enue. If they could let you re­place the freak­ing bat­tery, they would lose rev­enue.

And if there's one thing com­pa­nies hate is los­ing rev­enue. Ap­ple saw two paths ahead, one lead­ing to huge mon­ey, the oth­er to just big mon­ey. They have tak­en the huge mon­ey path, and it's work­ing for them. They are not go­ing back.

If ev­ery­one goes along for the ride, it will be a sad thing.