IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.