On the iPad
al3x.net
al3x.net
I simply do not buy this. A tinkerer is born a tinkerer. I had a Mac in the late 80s and throughout the 90s and the only way to program the damn thing was to beg my folks to shell a couple hundred bucks for CodeWarrior and another couple hundred bucks for Apple Reference books.
The dev tools today for the iPad cost $99, the reference is free with the tools. If I was a father right now and I had a ten year-old-tinkerer I'd buy one, give it to my kid, get them a dev account and say, "Hack the shit out of this thing."
EDIT: "A tinkerer is born a tinkerer + some parental encouragement". When my parents (who at the time had little money, father was in the Army) bought our first Apple IIgs, he said "You should learn how to write your own programs for it". I didn't even know what programming was. But this was enough to make me hunt school libraries for books on BASIC.
And how much for the computer which is capable of running those dev tools? The point is that the iPad isn't a device which can be used to modify itself, and if it entirely supplants other computers in a household, your experience becomes completely dictated by what other people have created.
The point is that the iPad is sufficient for the average user, but it prevents the graduation to power user by poking around and learning how things work. I very much doubt self-hosted development will ever be made available.
Of course, since your iPhone/iPod/iTouch data isn't in the cloud, you will need to sync to the desktop to backup. Not sure what happens if you sign up for MobileMe.
For the last few decades Nintendo has been the defining video game company in the US, but that is not their self-image. Look at what they're doing with the Wii or the DS: yoga trainers, anti-Alzheimers programs, dictionaries, cookbooks, exercise machines, and a little Mario on the side.
Will it supplant personal computers for some people? Sure. It just means that personal computers will have to shift to doing what they do best even better. It might drain a lot of life from the netbook market, but that's about it.
That said, you can be hacking an iPad for a minimum investment of about $1600. $500 for the iPad, $100 for the Dev Program, and $1000 for a MacBook.
$4000-$5000 vs $1600.
Not bad.
Even if it was $5000 that's a relatively small investment into your child's future.
Today, a kid with an inclination has access to many, many tinker-able things.
A lot of that stuff is new. They can tinker on the web via a browser, which they can do with this device. They can get a Linux machine. They can get Windows. They can get OSX. They can tinker on Android. There aren't that many android devices floating around that aren't someone's phone. In 5 years, there might be lots of old Android phones in drawers that the kid can have.
The fact that you cannot write your own software on an iPad is an arbitrary limitation so people don't like it, but within the ocean of possible tinkering, it is a small drop.
The practical pool of possibilities is growing. The existence of another device, even if it more successful then the iPhone, is not going to change that.
Put another way, if you have the choice of either (a) creating another environment (say a webbapp) where kids can tinker or (b) fighting back the "direction" that the iPad is taking us in, choose a.
Either you see the simple computer as some harbinger of the death of the PC, or you are an Apple fanboy who thinks the thing is a magic wand.
Guess what everybody. It's neither.
The iPad will have zero effect on the computing philosophy of the world. The world is no more open or closed than it used to be. And the iPad is just another (probably great, as usual) gadget from Apple.
All of you who are writing these windy pieces about the ramifications of the iPad have just been swept up in a mighty PR storm. Even those decrying the device are just helping Apple.
The iPad kills a lot of the reason for having paper.
(uhm, except once every 2 years when I renew my apt lease).
An article you want to go over, marking and adding notes (my wife does this sort of thing..)
A paper due to be submitted to someone who will mark & write notes and don't want to have to print it themselves?
Some reading material for locations where you don't want to take your $500 gadget?
Train: subway card; on-demand ticket dispenser at station. Even when I use the Acela I don't need to print anything.
Show: uhm, they should accept electronic display (then I'll use my iPhone - last concert was Kylie Minogue, and I got a paper ticket on the 2nd hand market)
Article: physical magazine or online reading. I never make notes on the physical article (then I'd have to have a filing system to keep it)
Paper: send it to me in PDF or some other open format; I'll send review notes back electronically.
Other reading material: books?
For some people it may be more convenient to print stuff, but not for me. Paper => physical clutter.
Apple's site does list a "iPad Camera Connection Kit" in the Accessory section of the "Tech Specs" page. It allows connecting with USB cameras. So the hardware is there. Who will make the software?
Your blanket statement is foolish and naive. The range of opinions is far and wide. For example I appreciate Apple's innovation and marketing skills, but I'm no love-blind Apple fanboy and yet I think their mobile strategy is completely game changing.
All of you who are writing these windy pieces about the ramifications of the iPad have just been swept up in a mighty PR storm. Even those decrying the device are just helping Apple.
Largely ignored by the blogs and "PR storm" is this simple underlying fact: with the iPhone, iPod Touch and now iPad what Apple has done for the "computing philosophy" of the world is successfully present an entirely new UI metaphor. They slipped it under our noses, in a 30+ year old world of the windows metaphor, they've marketed and popularized it and now we simply take this drastically different UI as common and expected. To be so cynical about Apple's impact with its mobile line of devices is to have your back to the future of innovation itself.
[Updated based on andrewljohnson's response]
Apple is no more open or closed than before (still totally closed).
EDIT: Since I can't respond to the commenter, I'll edit a response here. The comment is silly... the iPad just came out, the iPhone has been out for years. Maybe Apple got more closed with the release of the iPhone, but the iPad is more of the same.
And actually, iPods are locked down too, so iPhones were just more of the same. Oh wait, Macs were locked down too until Apple switched to Intel processors... so even iPods were nothing new.
The iPad is an attempt to replace the existing open environment of laptops and desktops. (Yes, Steve does want iPads and their successors to replace general purpose computers. It wouldn't be "the most important thing he's ever done" if it was just intended to be a super iPod touch).
Oh wait, Macs were locked down too until Apple switched to Intel processors
That isn't true for any reasonable definition of "locked down". Heck, there were more CPU upgrades available for PowerPC Macs than for Intel.
I've seen many strong arguments made against this, including the in this article. Since you don't want to read any more opinions about it I won't re-iterate, but I will point out that you're handwaving.
I disagree. We're in a time of change now -- very soon we won't be getting any of media in the same old ways. TV will be replaced with digital streaming. Music, for the younger generation, is already almost entirely digital. It's even becoming perfectly reasonable to read books on digital devices now.
However, this digital future is not open to everyone. My parents have a hell of time operating a computer and don't benefit from the latest streaming media technologies. They get their music on CD's. They read books on paper. The general purpose computer has failed them. Why shouldn't Apple fill this gap between the TV and the computer?
I'm sure Apple fans will lament the loss of general purpose computing devices from Apple. But it doesn't mean that the hacker era is dead. It just means that most hackers may have to look somewhere else to find a product that suits them.
Perhaps the microwave signals an end to the chef era of cooking history.
Will people please stop calling this the end of computing? If not for me, do it for CoCo [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/23/44346/3789]
Similarly, one possible future prompted by the iPad is one where "chefs" (hackers) do food preparation, but most people hit the power button.
Al3x is asserting that this is bad because there's not really much of a path from 'here' to 'there'. You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it.
What if you get started by writing HTML and Javascript code into a nice online editor - something like Bespin, or like those many different sites where you can code in all sorts of languages using a web-based front-end - and you get to publish your results to a web page and see the results immediately?
Does it get any easier than that?
Code - publish - save to home screen - "hey dad, check out this application I just made!"
Agreed - maybe even adding to your homescreen as a javascript bookmarklet so it's available offline.
Anyway, yes maybe the iPad wont inspire the next engineers, maybe it will inspire the next authors/bloggers/photographers/web developers/content creators.
For a few years there Apple put much of their effort into creating tools that gave more people access to the means of content production.
Now that they own major channels of media distribution (more all the time with the introduction of "xyz store"), their effort is focused on promoting content consumption much more than content production.
So is a book.
The microwave let people who didn't want to spend their time cooking do more interesting things. Is their life worse for the wear? Only because food prepared as a frozen dinner is inferior to food prepared by hand. The same is exactly the opposite of software. Software prepared by a professional is almost always of superior quality to a script that Bob wrote in his spare time. Maybe not if Bob is actually very good a programming, which leads into...
Al3x is asserting that this is bad because there's not really much of a path from 'here' to 'there'. You can't get started by running scripts in a shell, or writing AppleScript, or whatever — you get apps from the App Store and that's it.
This is patently false. The iPad is not a primary computing device, and will not replace a laptop or desktop, which by (current) definition is open to these things. Apple is not holding back the iPad-hosted compiler and shell. There is no iPad-hosted compiler or shell. Additionally, the development environment which does get you from 'here' to 'there' is openly (but not freely) available. You can write and run any application you choose, the same way that Apple does, via the Developer Program.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084790
Summary: You also can't get started being a surgeon by taking your pets apart and putting them back together, but people still go through years of medical school and become surgeons.
I am simply explaining the OPs fears. There exists an argument that the iPad could theoretically inspire more people to learn because its more "fun".
As someone who avoids processed food, I get where you're coming from, but our values are not necessarily other peoples values.
In much of Europe you will find that instant foods make up only a slightly larger part of a grocery than make-from-scratch does in the US. Very minimal.
My point being, while technology can enable and accelerate social and cultural changes, it usually is not enough. Usually there must also be a "real" movement where that technology fits. I think this applies to the iPad.
Whoa now. If I were a kid (and a tinkerer) and saw an iPad, I would immediately think, "how can I make something to run on this??" and go off and learn. People still have to write apps for this thing. Just because you cannot actively develop code on it does not mean that it will discourage young tinkerers from learning about programming (for iPad or any other platform).
Apple will continue to create "full computers" if for no other reason than for developers to create software for their "closed computers." That endgame would be sad, but we won't witness the death of desktop/laptop computers.
If someone is so concerned about teaching programming using the iPad, could one not write a BASIC app or some such? That's how I started learning to program: on a VTech computer when I was a kid... it was basically a 1x20 LCD output screen attached to a keyboard and 8 D-Cell batteries. It was mainly to teach typing and had a few trivia games, but it also had a BASIC mode... a very closed device with a BASIC app, sound familiar?
Also, let's not forget about young programmers learning how to do web-based sites/apps. They are not as powerful/fast as native apps, but at least it is a fast/easy/free way to start learning about programming/UI/etc and see it realized on the newest/hottest device. That would be exciting to me as a kid. Webapps are gateway drugs to native apps, trust me.
EDIT: found a picture of the old VTech computer - http://rasterweb.net/raster/computers/images/vtech.jpg
Now, a kid who does that is a "jailbreaker", and can be sued by Apple for DMCA violations, etc.
My own personal Apple experience: Age 17, Apple II. Open the covers, look at the circuitry, look at sample programs....a career began. New technologists need as many legal reference books as they do technical reference books. (Listen to the old guy refer to 'books') :-)
It's pretty odd to me how people have willingly accepted Apple's closed phone and media player ecosystem without batting an eye-lash, but the iPad is just outrageous as it encroaches on the PC.
Isn't the iPad just a logical continuation of Apple's trajectory of the last decade?
It strikes me as an arbitrary distinction to make.
Apple thinks that people have tired of dealing with anti-virus and task managers and package installers and folders and system updates.
Perhaps they're right, there is definitely a segment of the market that just wants a web browser and some rich media. They don't care about multi-tasking or customization.
If the iPad takes off, you can bet that locked down versions of OSX won't be far behind.
Google is headed in a similar direction with ChromeOS.
Apple's vision: "We'll give you an awesome experience, but you're going to pay us a little bit at a time for all of it."
Google's vision: "We'll give you an awesome experience for free, but you're going to tell us everything about you."
I'm just wondering why lots of very tech savvy people have never minded their ipods, cellphones, gaming consoles, etc, etc, etc being closed.
Maybe we should have been protesting those all along? Otherwise how do you reconcile accepting all of those but rejecting this device?
It's a triumph of creating something entirely designed to meet people immediate needs while not having any rough edges. And extensibility is inherently a rough edge.
But that doesn't change from the negative points the article makes - it illuminates them.
I'm less optimistic about consumers. The iPad might indeed be just what 'regular' consumers want....a new kind of fancy TV set. If so, the iPad is just right for them.
The dark cloud for me is that parallel. When TV was introduced, people had grand visions of an informed society, brought together by broadcasts of useful and enlightening knowledge. It ended up being an ad-selling jukebox of near-useless crap. We've projected the same (and even larger) hopes and dreams on the new technology...but the trajectory seems all too familiar.
There's another possibility here. Microsoft succeeded because of their focus on developers and, to some extent, having an open ecosystem as long as it suited their business goals. Forgetting this may be Apple's first slip up.
When OS X came out, tons of amazing apps came out that got many people switching: if Apple turns off those same developers, the platform will weaken.
The iPhone didn't get the buzz or the acclaim because of the App Store - it became thought of as a gift from the heavens! Steve has blessed us with this new way to add our value to the closed product. Watch this happen in a different extent with the iPad - something new will come up that will open it up ever so slightly, adding new features where Apple doesn't have the creative or physical capacity to develop.
There are many plausible interpretations of history. Mine is that Mac market share took off around the same time as the ascendancy of laptops, when screens and mobile CPUs got to the point where they were no longer hugely inferior to desktops. Mac laptop sales exploded because they're both more aesthetically appealing (which matters more for laptops since other people see them) and more functional (e.g. sleep and wireless actually work reliably).
I also think early alpha geek adoption of OS X helped to a lesser extent, both in terms of the software they created and in recommendations to friends and family. The iPhone/iPad may become like Windows in the 90s: what developers write for during the day to pay the bills, while they do their hacking on platforms that don't frustrate their desires.
"web" ... not found
"browser" ... not found
"safari" ... not found
Yes, well.
When did native apps become the new vinyl records? "Sure, the web is great and platform independent, but there's just more soul in compiled code."
The native app/app store combination is incontrovertibly the best way to deliver applications and have your product found.
To pretend otherwise is disingenuous or simply naive.
The entire scare here is that the iPad will make personal computing a closed ecosystem. But the web is already where most people spend most of their computer time, and Safari is an excellent and standards-complient browser.
No, you won't develop web apps for the iPad. You'll develop web apps, period. For the web. Which people will use on iPads and any other computer they please.
The battle that matters is keeping web standards open. Consumer operating systems can be as closed as they like, as long as they come with a compatible browser.
To gold rush developers, perhaps. I spend most of my iphone time in safari, and I don't think I'm alone. With a bigger screen I'd use it even more.
This thing is good for the web, which is what we all need to be pushing. It brings the web to the absolute front. This is "webTV" without all the stupid. A computer that gives you a modern browser and then gets out of your way. The fact that it also comes with a closed marketplace for proprietary apps is neat for a few lucky developers, but hardly matters to the "future of computing".
You're worrying about how we can make "the device" free. Why? All the good free stuff is, necessarily, device-agnostic, and this particular device gives above average access to it.
You could say the same about most PC's, actually. Time was, when you got a computer it had a few programs and some sort of interpreter or compiler to build your own program. Kids back then who got computers became programmers. Kids today get computers and go on the internet, and there's enough there to distract you that you don't get bored enough to install a compiler or something.
Somehow, kids still get into programming anyway.
Hacking is something that will always be around. The iPad may - if successful - usher in a new, possibly more mature era of computing, but people are still going to be hacking the new devices. Just because it ain't your daddy's '69 Camaro doesn't mean it can't be modded for the drag strip.
Computers and hacker culture will still exist, they can pry that from my cold dead hands. But while I am at it I will make some money in the market that Apple is creating.
Couldn't you have said the same about the games console?
Even now I can't program my Wii or any other major console, and that's been consistently true for over 30 years in games consoles. People knew then, just as they know now, if you want to tinker you get a real computer.
The difference is, now you'll be able to program for the device your friends use, where as programs I wrote on my PC stayed there and my friends with consoles could never use/play them.
(though it would be nice if you could develop from Linux and Windows machines too)
If I lived near a 5 star restaurant I would never have learned to cook.
If I could watch professional soccer I wouldn't learn to play.
There are dozens of closed systems, far harder to crack than the app store that people bulldoze through because they love them
Well made products strike chords with people and excite them to the point where they have to make something as nice, or better. If anything I think this will hasten the transition from passive TV watching to interactivity which will spur more hacking.
If I hadn't been able to scribble in the margins of my art books, I never would have learned to draw.
If all my meals had come pre-packaged and pre-approved by the food board with raw ingredients prohibited, then I would never have learned to cook.
If I could watch professional soccer but was prohibited from playing myself except on a regulation field (none of which were near my house) then I wouldn't have learned to play.
The existence of closed systems doesn't harm learning. But if the tools we give people are closed systems rather than open ones, that DOES harm learning... folks will learn to work with tools others build but will NOT learn to build it themselves. Which works great for becoming better consumers, but perhaps isn't the best way to create a new generation of inventors and innovators.
I don't understand why no one coined the term yet. The IPhone, IPod Touch and IPad are computers with some form of Trusted computing. The IPone and IPod Touch weren't a big cause for concern because they weren't seen as fully fledged computers (although technically, they are). The IPad, on the other hand, leaves no doubt.
I think few disagree here when I say that Trusted Computing is a scandal, is dangerous, and restricts our liberties. I think no one here would be willing to buy a "Trusted Computing" desktop (except for cracking it).
Yet many people here don't see the exact same danger with the IPad. Some even love it. Why? Maybe because the device looks new. Maybe because it is the logical sequel of the IPhone (it feels like being slowly cooked with the proverbial frog). Maybe it is because people feel safe when a big Gatekeeper keeps bad things out. Maybe this is a combination of all those things. Actually, I don't really know.
The IPad is Trusted Computing Without A Name. Accepting it is accepting Trusted Computing. Your choice.
As someone else remarked, if you want to hack, get the dev kit and start hacking (yes, $99/year; think of it as the tinkerer's software upgrade; we've already hashed that out elsewhere on HN).
I also think some of us should start submitting things like Squeak ports (with suitable UI upgrades for touch) as educational apps. I'll bet Apple would let 'em through, because they're no threat to the ecosystem.
I know there are simple programming languages out there on the App Store (e.g., some calculators allow Fortran-like expressions, etc.), so there's not really a ban on programming environments.
In fact, I think the ban in place on scripting language is precisely and exactly to keep Flash off the machine, and I don't blame Apple for wanting to keep that barrier high.
Anything else is unlikely to get stopped.
Yes, yes, it's sad that we have to go through the gatekeeper, etc. We've hashed that out as well.
But I think in the end that tinkerers can win on this machine if they're determined enough, even without jailbreaking.
Can't see how they could complain about that.
It seems like people aren't arguing about the right thing. It's like saying the iPhone sucks because you can't use vim, compile or use grep. Or that a microwave sucks because you can't put a big cooking pot inside.
Laptops and desktops aren't going away. Everyone is blogging like the end of the hacker world is coming. Apple isn't forcing anyone to buy their products. Worse comes to worse you can just build a PC if you don't like the convenience of a great looking prison.
Seems an uncool thing to say, but you know what? I'm waiting in that line! I think it looks great.
http://epeus.blogspot.com/2010/01/ipad-is-web-made-physical....
It won't be pretty, but neither was the Timex Sinclair 1000 that was the first computer that I programmed with BASIC.
I think that a large enough group of people will continue to want an extensible machine that closed systems like the ipad will have trouble seeming like a good deal - a Mac or a PC might a bit harder to use but it does have that one extra program you have to use sometimes.
Bad assumptions.
Are we sure there won't be an 'XCode' or other dev environment for the iPad? (See also, "YCRFS #5: Development on Handhelds" <http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html>.)
The MobileSafari browser alone is in many ways a richer programming environment -- with Javascript, Canvas, network and storage facilities -- than my Apple ][+ was with Applesoft Basic / Pascal / S-C Macro Assembler, or anything included in the early days of the Mac.
And won't many curious kids jailbreak their iPad? (Did young Al3x ever run pirated software on his 'hackable' machines? Does a bear shit in the woods?)
Given its larger format and educational uses, I also expect Apple will eventually loosen the scripting/runtime limits on the iPad (as compared to the iPhone), and possibly even offer an official 'jailbreak' for full access. They've already broken the lock-to-single-carrier and required-service-plans.
Then again, perhaps Alex Payne noticed some EULA fine print that says buying one of these forces you to discard every other object you own with a chip inside, and swear absolute allegiance to this ONE thing.
I suspect, instead, that Alex Payne is simply being an idiot.
Sheesh.
It's not a computer. It's an appliance.
If you want an open programmable device, they will cheerfully sell you a Mac.
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write.
And if I had a dishwasher rather than a real computer as a kid, I'd never be a programmer today, either. Oh, wait. The two have nothing to do with each other, except that they both contain microprocessors.
Upon reading that, I was immediately reminded of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
minus the sledge.
I think a lot of us recalled that old commercial...
Programming should be moving to the cloud anyway - heroku,appengine,aws is where the hacker should be innovating - do programming through the web browser
you can have kids do simple programming in the webbrowser in javascript
"You don’t want your phone to be an open platform," meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider's network, says Jobs. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/01/6597.ars
It would be curious to see what he has to say now. I admire the hell of the guy, but it really seems like he doesn't understand the criticism because to him the iPhone OS is the perfect environment. And as such, why would he let anyone screw it up?