What Jobs meant by "the progress of the platform"

That said, there's no direct connection between a great user experience and specifically using ObjC, not even in theory. There are many frameworks (MonoTouch comes to mind) which explicitly bind Cocoa/Touch to C#. The only difference is, instead of writing your logic in ObjC, you're doing it in a language you're more familiar with. This type of framework/cross-compiler leads to high-quality, reliable code that still provides a nice Apple-ey user experience.

On the flipside, you have plenty of app store apps (games, mostly, but others like convertbot) that totally eschew Apple's UI controls. These apps are written in 100% ObjC with all of Apple's tools, but simply prefer rolling their own because they think the user experience is better. Up to now (and as far as I can tell from my talks with them, still) Apple has no problem with this.

So I think your logic that using Apple's tools magically leads to a better user experience is flawed. True, some cross-platform environments lead to a subpar experience (potentially Adobe's CS5). But Unity3D and MonoTouch clearly contribute to the platform from a user experience standpoint.

A much better argument is that Apple is planning to make lots of changes going forward and they don't want to have to worry about waiting for the Unity people to update their compiler in order for developers to be able to implement [whatever] for their apps. For instance, the multitasking change is pretty big under the hood--who knows how long it will be before MonoTouch binds to it? That's much more likely to be Apple's concern.

TUAW made a similar argument to mine, but it's flawed in a couple of places because they don't understand OSX. There's nothing about cross-platform frameworks that makes multitasking hard per se, but making it more difficult to update existing code is going to be hard if Apple ever decides to break backwards compatibility, which clearly they're indicating they're going to do.

Of course, from Apple's POV this has the nice "side" benefit of locking developers in to ObjC going forward. Better for the platform or not, I think that's what has developers most upset--we've just gotten out of two decades of vendor lock-in under Microsoft. We were headed for the web, and we're about to miss it.

In the following years the Mac and its software was shaped by the people using it and developing as much, if not more, as by Apple itself.

Desktop Publishing was one of the areas where the Mac first showed in a practically useful form (1985) that its base was useful. But it was not new. ALL the basic ideas existed in the Xerox Star ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star ): laser printers, document publishing, layout, networked workgroups, user interface metaphor (the office), page description language, object embedding, ...). Apple designed the Mac to be much more affordable - but a useful system with disk, large screen, network, memory, laser printer added up to a substantial amount of money.

I'm not sure that I can name ANYTHING in early Mac-based desktop publishing that was not already presented in some form in the Xerox Star - the implementation of Desktop Publishing on the Mac then was joint work of Adobe (Postscript), Aldus (PageMaker), Canon (the laser printer) and others.

I don't believe in a company that thinks it can define the 'progress of a platform'. In my view progress it is a joint process by many people and companies, a process of ideas, implementations, failures, retrying, improving, feedback, ...

For the iPhone OS developers are degraded to do what Apple pleases. Innovation is no longer happening between people on the same level - Apple thinks it can control the process and the results. I think that leads to a shallow form of progress and innovation.

It's often been observed that as PCs kept getting faster, apps stayed at the same speed (or even slowed down), as layers of abstraction soaked up the extra cycles. To remain snappy, the iPhone simply can't afford that. At least not yet.