Written by 
(View full-size on MSNBC site here )
I’ve always been an Apple fan, so I found this cartoon amusing. It’s always fun to see what Steve Jobs will dream up next.
I also know many young men and women who work for Apple retail outlets, where they have a lot of fun and receive medical and retirement benefits if they work more than about 35 hours per week.
Esoteric geek crap follows:
I’m a big Apple fan for the last seven years, but I’m about to no buy any more of their products anymore. Their “walled-garden” iPhone/iPad development system sucks if you value the freedom to do what you want with the devices you own.
Android is shaping up to be an awesome platform with a lot of freedom and a huge amount of amazing devices. Unless Apple opens up their system, this will probably end up as poorly for Apple as the MacOS/Windows battle did in the 1990’s. Android is shaping up to the be the cheap, cheerful, and open platform
I hate to say it, but I’m glad Windows won. Having locked down appliances sucks for all of us in the long term.
Even more esoteric-y geeky crap:
The dimensions of the monolith are wrong, should be a 1-3-9 ratio of depth, width, height. I’m sure Bill Gates wouldn’t have screwed that up.
iPad
I’m totally in love with my iPad. As a web viewer, gaming device, movie player, e-reader, and email machine, it has NO equal on the market right now. I can even use it to control my servers in the office and make Skype calls over wi-fi. I literally haven’t touched my laptop in over a week, and my workouts are much more enjoyable now that I can watch any Netflix streaming movie while on the elliptical machine. The iPad isn’t meant to be a full laptop or desktop replacement, but for me, it has picked up 95% of the tasks I did on my home computers. It represents a new market segment that will surely explode as other companies enter it, but I don’t have a lot of faith in HP’s upcoming slate, which is based on Windows 7 and will apparently have only a 5 hour battery life, if that. The iPad’s battery life is amazing. I have yet to go below 50% charge, even after heavy use. Before people mock the iPad or dismiss it, they need to use it.
Regarding Apple’s walled garden: yes, Apple is all about control. Fortunately, there’s nothing holding back the Googles of the world from creating their own competing ecosystems for mobile devices and media players, and it’s likely that the Android platform will at some point surpass the popularity iPhone OS, at least on mobile phones.* But unlike Google, Apple is also a hardware company, with over four decades of experience making its own hardware and controlling the user experience on the devices it makes. As long as Google relies on partners like Motorola and HTC to make Android hardware and allows them to add their own proprietary extensions to the OS, it will never achieve the sort of seamless integration that Apple products enjoy, as it’s simply impossible to guarantee the quality of all such hardware/software combinations. And that’s fine with Apple. If Apple can continue to grow its business and rake in billions in profits with closed systems, its shareholders will be happy. The real problem is when a platform’s market share becomes so miniscule that software developers abandon it, like what’s happening with Palm’s Web OS right now.
By the way, while the Android OS is an open source platform, it would be naive to suggest that it isn’t ultimately controlled by a single company, Google. Is it any surprise that Android supports proprietary Google calendar syncing, but not the CalDAV standard? Surprisingly, Apple’s support for such standards is quite strong.
*That assumes that HTC (and ultimately, Google, by proxy) wins the lawsuits and ITC complaints that have been filed by Apple for patent infringement. Let’s face it, the “iPhone Killers” on the market have blatantly copied elements of the iPhone interface (and hardware design, for that matter), and Apple has a right to defend its patents. HTC’s touchscreen products were clunky and pretty much unusable before it started reverse-engineering Apple’s technologies.
Re: iPad
More geek stuff:
Don’t get me wrong – I love the iPad, and will buy several for my family. I shouldn’t be too grumpy – IBM in the 1960’s and Nintendo in the 1980’s both perfected the locked in model and I’m not yelling at them.
You’re right about Apple and open standards – Apple has singly handily kept OpenGL alive.
I’d love to see patent reform, and I’m sorry to see that Apple feels it can’t compete on the open market and chose to bash Google via proxy. Perhaps this is the stupid lawsuit that could lead to getting rid of software patents.
I don’t see the iPhone being particularly innovative at all, just well executed. Combine the best bits of the Nokia 710, 8xx series, the old Palm metaphor, and the weird UI crap that Linux geeks have been doing and you’d have an iPhone. Apple put the bits together brilliantly, and about two years ahead of everybody else, but it’s *that* big of a deal. Development for iPhone is horridly tied to hardware – not abstract at all. Bad Apple!
All the Windows 7 tables will suck until Intel gets another refresh at Atom. Shoehorning a desktop metaphor onto a tablet has been done and nobody liked it, so I don’t see how MS thinks that this is the magic year.
I’ll disagree with you on Android – google doesn’t control is at all except for the trademark. I can fork it any day I like and Google can’t do squat about it. I don’t even think HTC and Motorola pay royalties.
Developing for Android is amazingly awesome – they have the resolution independent parts down pat, so supporting weird screen resolutions is built in and you don’t have to worry at all about the user input stuff. You don’t have to care if it has a keyboard or not, and the processor is irrelevant.
I feel bad for Palm – they were about a year too late.
Curious, was HAL an Apple?
HAL was an IBM – shift the letters of HAL down the alphabet by one: H->I A->B L->M
Yeah, in fact in a superbowl ad HAL was actually shown saying “you like your mac better than me, don’t you Dave?”
Wow, something that actually makes sense. Maybe I should pay more to the commercials during the superbowl and not just laugh at them.
Actually, it’s Heuristic ALgorithmic. The letter shift was quite a coincidence.
Clarke and Kubick are full of it when they came up with their ex-post-facto explanation. I don’t blame them at all, IBM was good to them and helped with 2001. Not only is the HAL -> IBM shift a statistically almost impossible coincidence. But the most important thing is when HAL is getting powered down and reverts to being a “child” computer is tarts singing Daisy Bell, that creepy “Bicycle built for two” song. The computer that first sung any song was an IBM 700 series n the early 1960’s. The song???? Daisy Bell.
There were other real IBM computers in 2001 – the Pan Am space-clipper has one in the cockpit.
So yes… HAL isn’t a real IBM, but I’ve never heard a man in a blue suit complain about the similarities, and the IBM guys were rather giggly when the invented the virtual machine concept and the HAL (Hardware Abstration Layer) concept.