
IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak - sumeeta
http://www.slate.com/id/2249872/
======
thought_alarm
It's funny how so many people are suddenly mischaracterizing the Apple II or
the nature of early personal computers.

The very first personal computers, like the Apple II, were sold as development
kits to developers/hobbyists because these were the only people who would even
think to buy a personal computer in 1976 and 1977. These development kits
contain all of the information one would need to create software and hardware
for these machines. Is that so unusual?

Fast forward one short year to 1978 and Apple hires Jef Raskin to start the
"McIntosh" project. His goal is to create a $500 computing appliance that the
average person could own and use. Sound familiar?

Fast forward 32 years. There is more information published about the internals
of Linux, Windows, OS X, and PC architecture than most developers would ever
want to know. We can write low-level drivers that run in the kernel, to high-
level scripting languages. We can design a custom hardware card to slap in a
PC or MacPro; we can design custom hardware that connects to an iPhone or a
laptop via USB. And the iPad is arguably the closest we've come to Jef
Raskin's 1978 vision of a computing appliance.

~~~
glhaynes
I almost entirely agree with your post, though I'll note that the Apple II was
unique specifically _because_ it came pre-assembled in a plastic case and was
marketed to "regular people". Still, obviously most users were hobbyists, just
less "hardcore" than those who assembled their own Altairs.

~~~
nkassis
and the comodore 64 was a kit?

~~~
rbanffy
The 64 appeared much later.

~~~
whyenot
True, but the Commodore PET was released in 1977. No assembly required.
Another example is the Tandy TRS-80 Model I, also released in 1977.

~~~
hernan7
Also, let's not forget the grand-daddy of the out-of-the-box-experience
computer appliance -- the Atari 2600. Came out in 1977 too.

------
david927
Woz has always about being open and modular and extensible. Jobs has always
been about the opposite -- and for good reason; the early Macs were typically
more stable and functioned better simply because of that lock-in.

But history has played this over and over again, and Woz always wins. Vendors
work out standards; the user experience consolidates.

If you give people the freedom and trust them, they'll work it out. Or you can
trust a benevolent dictator to work it out for you. Most Apple afficianados
will say the most people don't want that freedom; I'm here to tell you that
they do.

We don't have to debate. Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad
starting next month, after the faithful have all bought theirs. Woz will win.
Woz _always_ wins.

~~~
houseabsolute
> Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month

We already watched the sales of the iPhone, and we saw how that went. Same
type of device, same type of complaints by openness advocate, and what was the
result? Are you guys going to just keep on saying this stuff until some closed
Apple product fails, then say that's proof that people want openness, ignoring
the litany of preceding closed devices that succeeded? I'm here to tell you
that this is not a very good argument.

~~~
abstractbill
Android gained 5.2% of the US smartphone market between December 2009 and
February 2010, while the iPhone lost 0.1%
(<http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=9184>).

Of course I'm not going to declare the iPhone a failure - it's clearly done
very well. But I think it's still a little early to call it a winner.

~~~
houseabsolute
In all likelihood both will continue to be part of the mobile ecosystem for
some time, or until Google gets tired of throwing money at the problem.

But as I said to another responder, the iPhone is one device on one carrier
per country, and Android is many devices on all carriers. They are hardly on
equal footing for a purely numerical battle for superiority, but still iPhone
is winning.

~~~
Daishiman
Google is making real money with Android, and even if it's a loss leader it's
just another medium to expand their search business. They can afford to lose
the millions in Android develoment and they still come out winning.

~~~
houseabsolute
What money do you suppose they are making? It's probably cheaper to pay Apple
to maintain Google as the default search engine on the phone than to make
their own. It's unlikely that a whole lot more internet searches are happening
because of Android that wouldn't have happened in any other arrangement of the
ecosystem, so I still don't see how Google benefits.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Yes, that's an option. But consider this: the iPhone becomes the number one
smartphone out there -> Mobile Safari has the highest mobile marketshare of
any web browser -> Apple controls the mobile web. What Google ultimately want
is an open web so they keep making money from AdSense/AdWords.

------
plinkplonk
"Wozniak's design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those
concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as
with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine.
Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products,
Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak's
machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add features. There were slots to
accommodate all sorts of peripheral devices, and it was built to run a variety
of software. Wozniak's ethic of openness also extended to disclosing design
specifications. In a 2006 talk at Columbia University, he put the point this
way: "Everything we knew, you knew." To point out that this is no longer
Apple's policy is to state the obvious."

I suspect the resurrection of this vision is what will begin the fightback
against Apple's closed universe vision. If I could get the same (or better)
hardware, with roughly the same formfactor as the IPad with a lot of
connectors and a completely hackable software stack for a decent price, that
would be awesome. The only competition shaping up on the hardware front seems
to be HP's slate. Maybe I should buy one and install Linux (or something else)
on it when it comes out.

(If I am wrong correct me, what is a good tablet that competes with the IPad?)
I would love to see something built around an ARM processor for e.g. but
building hardware is a lot tougher than in Woz's days. As a thought experiment
if just the hardware part of the IPod were available for say 350 $ or so it
wasn't closed and were completely open like the original Apple so we could
hack whatever on it, how many of us would buy one? I would. If i had the
harware chops i'd build and sell this myself.

Linux is awesome but there isn't a competing (with the IPad) hardware platform
to run it on. Hopefully some one will have the cojones and talent to go up
against Apple soon. Remember, once Microsoft was the unstoppable juggernaut
who were on track to dominate all of computing.

I hope to live to see the day of the withering of Apple.

~~~
philips
Always Innovating's Touch Book is probably close to what you want. The
hardware specs are open, there are pins for serial on the board, and it can
run a variety of ARM based Linux distros (Android, Ubuntu, etc).:
<http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/>

Plus the disassembly instructions are provided by the manufacturer:
<http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Top_part>

~~~
orangecat
That looks very nice, except for the abysmal 1024x600 resolution. I'll give
Apple credit for having the iPad resist the inexplicable war on vertical
pixels.

~~~
mahmud
I will trade vertical pixels for freedom _any day_.

------
samd
I found this quote from Wozniak in Founders at Work to be ironic.

 _"You'd go to the store and they'd just have all this stuff that you could
buy to enhance the Apple II. So one of our big keys to success was that we
were very open. There's a big world out there for other people to come and
join us."_

~~~
joezydeco
But all of those were things that were left out of the Apple ][ project for
various reasons: either they didn't exist yet (Disk ][ being the prime
example), or were too expensive to add to the motherboard.

What exactly is lacking from modern hardware today? Not enough communications
capability? Screen isn't large or hi-res enough?

The expandability has moved to software. That's the App Store. People are
customizing their machines and adding capability, but they're doing it through
the SDK and not the schematics.

~~~
jacquesm
Any restrictions on modern hardware are likely to be strategic. For instance,
the reason you can't make voice calls with the ipad and that it doesn't have a
camera is most likely because that would mean you no longer need an iphone.

The parts would have added another $5 to the total cost, if that. It also
gives them a reason to sell you a new one a year or two down the line. Along
with less anemic ram, needed for this amazing new feature called multi-
tasking.

------
nkassis
After reading this book about Commodore: [http://www.amazon.com/Edge-
Spectacular-Rise-Fall-Commodore/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-
Rise-Fall-
Commodore/dp/0973864907/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270671408&sr=1-3)

and a few other good accounts of the period, it really annoys me that Apple
get the credit for inventing the personal computer. They were not even the
most popular personal computer of the 80s (or 70s). I have a hard time finding
anyone who own a Apple II but most of the people I work with were Commodore 64
owners.

~~~
stan_rogers
The winners get to write the history -- and in the end, more people had more
to do with Pagemaker, Illustrator and Photoshop (which were, in practical
terms, Mac apps) than they did with the far-more-spectacular (for the time)
Video Toaster and Caligari (Amiga). It's never been the machine; it's what
people can do with it. If prosumer video was more accessible and lit more
imaginations at the time, we'd be singing a different song today.

------
_delirium
By these standards, hasn't Steve Jobs been notching up final victories over
Woz for at least 25 years? In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read people claiming
it repeatedly! As far back as the early 80s, the Mac marks the turning point
where Apple became primarily focused on a self-contained, don't-touch-the-tech
computing appliance. The introduction of the Mac, and the way it won out over
the Apple II successors, also marks Woz's personal influence in Apple
effectively coming to an end.

It's not as if this is a recent idea Apple's had. If anything, OSX's relative
openness was the aberration, given their history. Despite how exciting we find
the Apple II era, I tend to think of the Mac as a bigger part of their
history, certainly in terms of the Mac era's influence on today's company.

~~~
orangecat
_It's not as if this is a recent idea Apple's had._

No Macs ever prevented you from running and distributing whatever software you
wanted. And while there wasn't a command line before OS X, there were a great
deal of opportunities for hacking via extensions, ResEdit, HyperCard, etc.

~~~
ynniv
That is primarily because they couldn't. But note the distinct lack of
hardware expansion on early models: [
<http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.txt> ].

------
jacquesm
There are multiple 'axis' to this victory business, and this one - the money
angle - is only a single way of interpreting all this.

If I could choose between the two of them as human beings I'd pick Wozniak for
sure, he's one of the nicest 'well to do' people that ever came out of silicon
valley.

Jobs is simply still in a pissing match with Gates, and it looks like he will
be able to prove some day that Apples view of the software market was even
more closed than Microsofts, and potentially far more profitable.

I bought a Mac for my son a couple of years ago, I'm beginning to regret that
decision. At the time it was to open his eyes to the fact that not every
computer on the planet runs the same operating system and that diversity is
good. Now I'm not so sure that an Apple was the right way to express that (he
already had an older linux computer to play with blender on, but it was
definitely past its prime).

Money is a very convenient yardstick to measure success by, but it collapses a
lot of data in to a single number and it does not tell you the history of how
it got there.

Clearly 'open' is never going to make as much money as 'closed', the RIAA and
MPAA are all too aware of that, but longer term 'open' will always win because
stuff that is special today is a commodity tomorrow.

Remember the times when each and every piece of electronics came with it's own
weird set of proprietary protocols and connectors? Now it's all IP and we're
better off because of that, except for the lawyers.

------
rms
Single page: <http://www.slate.com/id/2249872/pagenum/all/>

------
stcredzero
Some sort of hacking sandbox is needed for the iPad. Something like Hypercard
would be dandy. Then again, aren't web apps already available? Safari is a
very good Javascript platform. Maybe an iPad version of iWeb with a "local
server" and some sort of app publishing/sharing via Mobile Me?

Actually the beauty of this approach, is that a 3rd party could come out with
this quickly, using App Engine or Amazon as a back end. Combine that with an
iPad App that opens a special purpose browser/Ide to run them in, and I think
you'd have a business.

~~~
bad_user
Personally I'm getting tired of hearing about how Javascript-enabled web apps
are good enough. No, they aren't.

Yeah, it's exciting that Quake2 runs in Chrome/Safari, it really is. But in
95/96 I was participating in demo-scenes, with graphics that weren't
accelerated by the GPU, in 386 real-mode, and it was a lot easier and a lot
more exciting (demos that got distributed by a local PC magazine, having as
target more people than the people that actually tried that HTML5 Quake2
demo).

So welcome to 1997.

~~~
jrockway
But of course those demos were very limited in scope, because the development
techniques used to create them were impossible to scale up.

~~~
gloob
Forgive me if I'm being dense, but I'm not certain what that has to do with
the point being made. Could you explain it in greater detail?

My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's put
it on a website" is not a viable method. You can write many types of apps that
way, certainly, but you pretty much give up anything so much as pretending to
be performance. Additionally, it prevents you from doing anything particularly
low-level - if you were desperate enough, you could always set up a web
interface to gcc or something, but that won't help you if you want to hack on
a device driver or something. Systems programmers are people too, you know. ;)

~~~
stcredzero
_My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's
put it on a website" is not a viable method._

But if you recall what Hypercard stacks were like, then putting it on a
website that's specially tailored to make it easy, combined with a local app
to make things more seamless, might actually be a money making proposition.

Put the hacking open/closed politics aside. What do you think about the idea
as a business?

------
wrs
While the idea of Jobs vs. Woz philosophies seems basically accurate, they
diverged a bit later than the author says.

Apple had no control over the software and hardware used with the original
Macintosh. The author is just flat wrong on this. The serial connectors were a
bit weird for the time, but that was it. There was none of the patented-
connector, crypto-signed-applications, brick-the-hacked-devices tactics we see
with the i* line. The Mac OS didn't even have kernel mode. You could just
rewrite all of RAM with your own code and jump to address zero if you felt
like it, and people did.

The Apple //c was as "closed" as the Macintosh, and I'm pretty sure Woz had
something to do with that machine (you could even get a signed limited
edition).

Modern Macs are made with plenty of standard parts, and the worst that happens
if you mess with them is that you void the warranty--which is exactly what
happens if you mess with the insides of a Dell or HP computer.

The true divergence is that Jobs now has Apple producing consumer
entertainment devices in addition to computers. Obviously, the tradeoffs and
rules are different for consumer entertainment devices. Whether it's an
iPhone, a PS3, or the radio in my car, the manufacturer isn't interested in
supporting openness and arbitrary hacking--they are expected to make a
functional, attractive product that "just works", which requires maintaining
some control over what goes into it.

P.S. AT&T Wireless is the result of AT&T absorbing McCaw Cellular, and
separated again from AT&T years ago, so while it's fun to talk about the irony
of Jobs' blue-boxing, that wasn't really quite the same company.

------
neilk
This article is basically fluff. It is trying to turn Apple's evolving
business strategies into some sort of personality conflict. One that guys like
Woz probably wouldn't acknowledge is real.

From the moment they were selling real products and not kits, Apple has always
wanted to control every aspect of the computing experience. For a while, at
Apple, it was considered heresy to be an "Open Mac" supporter -- that is, you
thought it was okay to allow third party companies to produce peripherals like
disk drives or printers. It was only around '87 or so that the idea of an
expandable Mac saw the light of day (the Macintosh II) and that product line
slowly petered out in the 90s.

People on this thread are suggesting that the OS was hackable with a floppy
disk out of some desire to be friendly to tinkerers. Don't be silly. It was
that way because there was no other conceivable alternative for software
distribution.

If we disregard Apple's mid-90s confusions it's been on a steady road towards
the iPad since the beginning, in rhetoric if not always in reality.

------
rbanffy
> Wozniak, an inveterate prankster, ran an illegal "dial-a-joke" operation

"illegal"?! I am not aware it would be illegal to run such a service at that
time.

> the Macintosh was a radical innovation in its own right, being the first
> mass-produced computer to feature a "mouse" and a "desktop

Lisa? Star? Although that last one was not "mass-produced", at least it came
out of a factory.

~~~
Lazlo_Nibble
At the time, you weren't allowed to hook arbitrary equipment up to the phone
system -- everything had to be approved by AT&T. IIRC the hardware Woz used
for his dial-a-joke setup was homebrew.

~~~
jcl
Apparently it was not homebrew; here are a couple articles saying that he
rented the equipment from the phone company. So the dial-a-joke thing might
have been entirely legit.

<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.09/woz.html>

<http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/07.html>

I'm guessing that when the article describes the dial-a-joke service as
illegal, it's confusing it with his blue-box antics, which occurred around the
same time. According to the following article (a fun read), the blue box
preceded dial-a-joke; he got the inspiration for the service from a dial-a-
joke line in New York that he called while demoing blue boxes to potential
customers:

[http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_mi...](http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranksters_of_microcomputing.php)

------
dkersten
_It might overrun Sony and Microsoft in computer gaming_

I don't understand.. how?

At best, I see it appealing to a small niche gaming market, but as it stands,
I can't see how it would overrun Sony or Microsoft - for example, the iPad is
hugely underpowered compared to todays popular gaming machines and you would
definitely need to couple it with some other input devices, like keyboard &
mouse or gamepads, since multitouch alone doesn't seem all that suitable for a
lot of games IMHO.

~~~
hammerdr
iPhone, smartphone and iPad gaming isn't going to be what console or PC gamers
are going to expect. However, we're not talking about those type of people
buying this device.

For example, Brickbreaker has been played by over 50 million people while COD:
Modern Warfare 2 has only been played by 15 million.

These type of games (that hardcore gamers would consider silly and frivolous)
are going to be the dominant games in the marketplace.

------
stretchwithme
tis the nature of many products in an evolving economy to grow more capable,
complex inside, more simple to use and more taken for granted.

the iPad is just one more of those things and the Woz stood in line eagerly to
get his.

------
CamperBob
Hmm, I'm beginning to see why they used an Apple ][+ in LOST. Jobs as the Man
in Black, against Woz's Jacob. ("You have no idea how much I want to kill
you.")

------
Sapslzr
more like Steve Jobs final step into the dark side

------
baguasquirrel
I get this same vibe from a lot of older folks (or people who want to sound
like them, all grizzled and what). True, from a hardware standpoint, Apple
devices are closed. What matters today however, is that they are open devices
from the perspective of a platform and web software developer.

Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone? And
lets not forget that we make stuff for _normal_ people here. Not just hackers
like us. As it turns out, most folks don't want a hardware-hackable machine.
They don't care enough for USB ports. The tablets being championed by MSFT in
the previous decade were not much more moddable than the iPad, but I don't see
anyone yelling at MSFT about that.

~~~
wmf
_Has everyone forgot how cellphones were black boxes before the iPhone?_

I must have forgotten that because it isn't true. On my P800 or Blackberry I
could install any app, not just approved ones.

(Edit: I wonder if this meme about the "cell phone dark ages" comes from the
millions of people who switched from dumbphones to iPhone and thus aren't
personally familiar with the actual smartphone state of the art circa 2006.)

~~~
drenei
I can't speak for where you are, but here in North America (well Canada & the
USA) to go from [cell phone customized for service provider] to [cell phone
customized for you with apps that you selected to use] was never a simple
process - perhaps easier on a blackberry but not simple.

The device makers simply didn't have enough leverage to make the process
simple.

~~~
wmf
I _am_ in the USA and IIRC there was no "process" with my T-Mobile Blackberry;
I could install any app I wanted directly from the Web browser. Maybe that's
some kind of exception since T-Mobile is the least evil carrier.

