Steve Wozniak gives jailbreaking the thumbs up, wishes iTunes supported Android
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Woz always takes very predictably pro-hacker positions; I'm not clear why we regard it as news when he does.
What direction? He has no influence on Apple's decision.
But in a few years time when Google have similar deals in place and any advantage is marginal (if that), it might happen. While Apple aren't really in the business of selling music (obviously they do but it's a relatively small part of their revenue mix next to hardware sales) there is an opportunity there.
That said over time as these deals become more common, the music business is going to be commoditised which will squeeze profit margins. It may be that those lower margins mean that even with access to a significantly larger potential market Apple aren't interested - they've never really been a high volume, low margin business.
As I said it is hard to say what would happen and by how much.
Go read the front page right now. Do it. Half the items on there are just stuff that people want to talk about. Notch's new office (oooooohhh!). Yet another Apple/Samsung article (woah!). The 256th python tutorial (wheee!)... Maybe just get over it, hmmm?
I have a work mac, work pc, home mac, kobo, ipod & android. Sounds like a lot when I list it out. I'm not really a gadget person and some of those are pretty old. I use them all though and every one or two years I expect to add or replace a "device". Apple will be considered and sometimes chosen.
That's not unusual. Most Apple customers are not monogamous. Realistically, Apple have never been the company with so many options you never need to go anywhere else. They have been the company that's reluctantly good at bringing devices together and connecting them with a marketplace.
They don't like harmonizing elements they don't control. They would prefer the world divided nicely into Apple people and non Apple people. That's not realistic.
To improve Apple users' experience they need to support foreign devices. Mac users use android and many avoid itunes altogether (they need to think in terms of 'files' anyway). Ipod users use android and their ipod never has the podcasts they've been listening to. iPad users can't read the book they are halfway through on sony reader.
They wanted ipod users to just plug them into a mac, but that wasn't realistic so they released itunes for windows. I think its time for another compromise.
Google has the thousand flowers mentality.
Apple doesn't like to develop anything that admits the existence of intelligent life outside of Apple. In fairness, they are a "do few things well" company. They don't actually make that much software. They also don't like to do things that don't directly make money. There isn't a whole lot of money to be made selling apps on Android or windows mobile.
But yeah, itunes/ipod for android would be a no brainer for any other company. Just like kindle, for ipad. At Apple it requires divine revelation.
Wow! Ok, I'm guessing you're of an age where you were probably very young at the time, but exactly this happened. Microsoft, for years, threatened to cancel office for the mac (office only exists because of the mac- word and excel started in the mac before windows existed.)
Apple used their control over office to drive Apple nearly to bankruptcy in the 1990s. It was only until Microsoft got caught red handed shipping source code stolen from Apple that they were forced to negotiate, and that produced a massive settlement where Microsoft paid Apple many billions of dollars over 5 years, both companies entered a broad patent cross licensing agreement (Which is still in effect, and which is why microsoft doesnt' ship something like android which is an iOS ripoff- but was forced to do something original with Windows Phone.)
And of course, part of that agreement was that Microsoft would continue to ship office for the mac.
> "If the office team wants to make software for mac or android or whatnot, I don't think they'd be stopped."
Not how microsoft works at all, and I know this because I worked there. Anything that is seen as a threat to the windows monopoly is killed, immediately.
Office for Microsoft's own tablets was mortally wounded because it was seen as a threat to the desktop windows empire.... which is part of the reason the tablet market was in terminal shape until the iPad came out.
> They don't actually make that much software. They also don't like to do things that don't directly make money.
Apple makes a great deal of software that it is unable to directly monetize-- iOS and Mac OS X are good examples. While Apple charges $20 for OS X, that's ancillary.... Apple also makes a great deal of software- from games like Texas Holdem Poker (which they made to help jumpstart the App Store to Final Cut Pro X which was made to make the Mac relevant for that class of creatives back in the day) almost all of Apple's software efforts are to support the platform. Hell they even make a database and Office apps so the mac can never be without good solutions in these areas.... and then they sell them for cheap.
Do you have any source for this or are you just making it up? Microsoft agreeing to continue making Office for mac was the settlement of a bogus patent lawsuit where Apple sued Microsoft for having a GUI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...
I know he accomplished some cool stuff 30-odd years ago, but why is his opinion still relevant? What technology is he actually working on now?
He just seems to be a reliable semi-controversial rent-a-quote for busy journalists. He's not even that insightful.
I realise this will cost me karma, but whatevs.
It's not so much that Woz is a source of wisdom and insight, it's more that there are few gurus and "experts" in computer science (generally a good thing) willing to offer opinions.
Woz is in the position of being able to take philosophical positions that people won't be likely to argue with, because of his long incumbency in the field of computer technology.
But that's an explanation, not an excuse. In fields that depend on scientific reasoning, there's no justification for accepting the opinions of experts based solely on their position. As Richard Feynman famously said, "Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion."
I think that your criticism above is the heart of the matter. If Woz had deep thoughts he were relating that informed in a meaningful way, great.
Instead, he tends to spew out populist geek one-liners without any supporting rationale.
What's disappointing is the way that the tech culture picks it up as an appeal to authority or noteworthy opinion.
But with that said, I think Woz is a very cool individual that's fun to listen. Does the radical / polar position toward the Apple cult make him that? Perhaps. However his work, albeit 30 years old, is still an inspiration, and his public persona isn't entirely focused on bashing the modern Apple methodology.
I don't know what he's working on now, if anything in concrete, but he's obviously not sitting on his hands :)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/25/what_does_steve_wozn...
Roughly half the items that appear on this feed are not news, you know.
(There's an interview with Brian Kernighan on the front page right now. Are you going to complain about that one too? Should we post complaints about every single story that we don't like, that receive a little bit of attention?)
Quote! "It’s better to think constructively about what can be done with our mobile platforms to improve our lives more, rather than trying to throw darts and insults". And this is why Woz is still relevant. He understands that it's not about the iPhone or the Galaxy S3 or which ever device you have, but about what it does for you. They've all been drastically transformative in day to day life for a huge amount of the population of the Western world. Tech blogs and geek circles spend that much time sniping at each other that we seem to forget how quickly things have progressed. They're all great devices.
I'm actually saddened that after 30 years of working for Apple, Woz still hasn't learned that coddling your competitors and giving up your competitive advantages are bad for business.
edit: gotta love the ninja downvotes. Must have touched a nerve. :)
But honestly, Woz quotes at this point are basically "Preacher Delivers Sermon to Choir, Film at 11". The only people who bother to listen to him are people who already agree with with he's going to say, so whose understanding is being broadened by this? And how are these kinds of stories going to accomplish anything in the wider world beyond HN?
I'd guess a lot, but even if that's wrong, it takes hundreds of incremental music sales to offset the loss of just one iPhone sale.
Amazon MP3 works flawlessly. Who needs iTunes?
Eh? Winamp, DoubleTwist, Spotify, and even Windows Media Player all sync flawlessly, and Google Play Music and Android Cloud Player work great, too.
Speaking for myself, one of the main reasons I chose an iphone+ipad over android is because I love watching indie films, and iTunes is great for this. Their content library includes so much stuff that just isn't available anywhere else. Being able to instantly start watching a high quality version of a relatively obscure indie film can currently only be done on an apple platform (please correct me if I'm wrong here).
I would love it if iTunes was available on other platforms, but I can't see it happening. I don't understand why no one else has been able to secure these content deals that Apple seems to exclusively hold.
The battle of mobiles is not about the hardware and the OS, at least, not only, but about the ecosystem around it. Google would not like its Play ecosystem to be on Apple's device, it is important for them that people buy their platform to get access to it (however, nobody would like to do that nowadays as the Play ecosystem is quite small). Now if you think about iTunes...
As Apple's smartphone market share continues to erode, it will make more and more sense for Apple to try and capture some of the media purchase revenue from Android users by providing an iTunes app.
As the only people making money from mobile is Samsung and Apple I doubt apple care about market share stats.
The iTunes eco system is there to sell hardware not to make apple tons of money.
And the whole app store mechanism? Whether it is itunes or android's or whatever's?
That's what he loves it for. (And I'm assuming you're wondering why he loves a product that is so ugly/slow/complicated/whatever; I suspect that's not Steve Wozniak's point).
He did invent the universal remote (but it got copied by everybody right away.)
He's a nice and well meaning guy and was a consumate engineer. But he was never the product guy.
On the Apple II he liked to try and get as much functionality out of as few parts as a challenge-- a technical challenge. It was Jobs who knew this would let them have a competitive advantage (or cared about it, anyway.)
He was critical to the early years of Apple. Jobs was not nearly as good of an engineer (but unlike what many people seem to think, Jobs was an engineer.)
but it was Jobs who understood how to make products really great, and why you needed to, and who made Apple the company it is today.
It was Jobs who cared about design as much as engineering.