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September 9, 2016

The unbitten Apple

apple_logo.jpg

At some point, though, Apple lost patience with us, with our fiddling, our ineptitude.
It began to see the bite as a wound, and ever since it has been seeking to heal the damage. Apple wants to be pristine, untouched by outside forces, entire onto itself. Apple’s ideal now is the unbitten apple, the immaculate fruit.

One by one the portals go, the entrances and exits are sealed.
The customer is locked out of the device — and locked into the “ecosystem.” Today, in a media ceremony, it was the headphone jack that was exorcised. That tiny analog orifice linking the iPhone back to the transistor radio, the Walkman, the iPod: gone. And why not? With the socket and its audio converter removed, the phone will become even slimmer, even lighter, even more elegant. It will be better insulated against the elements. It will be more totemic. It will be purer - - ROUGH TYPE

Posted by gerardvanderleun at September 9, 2016 12:23 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

Well, there you go - the reason why PC types, users and engineers both, are annoyed by Macs (and coincidentally, Mac users.) The Mac help manual has always been essentially "Hey, you were hip enough to buy a Mac. Just click on something and trust to luck." What computer engineers always loved about IBM (and then clones) was that if you paid attention, you'd start to apprehend the analogic reasoning behind every bit of architecture and command structure - and you could soon predict how it was going to respond several steps down the line, and a smart guy could skip steps and save time.

As a matter of fact, in the early days of GUI design it became so apparent that chaos was just around the corner that an industry-wide conference called Common User Access was convened, first in '89 and then in '91, wherein the standards for GUI design as well as menu structure were defined once and for good. As I used to point out to students in the '90s, "Moses didn't come down from the mountain with a tablet that said 'The File Menu Will Always Be On The Left.' Somebody somewhere had to establish that." - a default order of menus, left to right, to be used on EVERY WINDOW, and a default order of commands therein.
Anybody ever notice that "Exit" is always at the bottom of the File menu? CUA '89. Und so weiter...

The deal was, as you will probably notice, Microsoft was pretty much the only provider who hewed to and enforced the standards. IBM's OS2, Mac operating systems, etc, pretty much left it up to the designer how the logic worked in his new app - and sure enough, chaos reigned. No two windows looked alike, and it sure was fun, if your idea of a computer was that it was essentially a video game.

Whee.

If you were somebody who had other interests beyond hacking around until something worked, it became a source of deep satisfaction that knowledge in the PC world was cumulative, and that you only had to figure out the sequence of events once. Every new program/application observed the same rules and logical hierarchy, and intersected with the operating system in the same manner. That probably sounds like "well, duh!" now, but believe me it was an eye-opener to new users 20 years ago.

Even better was that if you were an engineer, you could lift the hood and see what was going on below the GUI, and fix it if necessary. It's no accident that PC nerds started calling 'em "Hackintoshes." It also became quickly apparent, from the front of a class, that the Mac devotees were always the most defensive, and the most ready to project their tantrum onto the IBM guys - "You're always shoving your logic down my throat!" Just exactly, it develops, like liberals and atheists and other charming species. All of whom turned out to be Mac-heads. There's a message there somewhere.

I used to tell students that the letterhead at Apple headquarters had a line across the top reading "I've Got A Secret," in Latin.

Posted by: Rob De Witt at September 9, 2016 2:51 PM

Ahhhh, nothing like misplaced nostalgia.
"Ach, me puir, wee headphone jack!" is the newest bit of the same. I've had mobile devices since I had a WindowsCE palmtop and I've been using bluetooth, NFC, and wifi for so long I would have to look to see where the analog jack on my phone, or tablet, or other table, or laptop actually are. Bluetooth headsets and speakers are cheap, ubiquitous, and reliable - why maintain a tech that's as old just because?
Were you this upset when laptops stopped coming with serial ports? That was actually something that impacted business!
[I have the Fry's receipts for adaptors attached to expense reports to prove it, too].
Nah, I bet 99.7% of the people talking about how "turribul" the death of the headphone jack is never used a serial port and those that did didn't notice when they went away and certainly didn't care.
Oh, and Mr. De Witt? May I call you Rob?
Enterprise data centers use Unix and its kin and lament the fact they are forced to support Windows for the various people who are used to it, like sales.

Posted by: Rick at September 9, 2016 3:55 PM

re: Rob De Witt's comment.

Surreal at best is his history of GUI. Windows differs from the Lisa/Mac interface because of the law suit by Apple against Microsoft in the 1980s. Gates had, according to Apple, stolen the farm and Microsoft's lawyers won with some interface changes being made to Windows. But Microsoft during those years had been accused of stealing much if one reads the history such as code from Tom Pittman and also Gary A. Kildall's Digital Research's CPM. Kildall's company wasoriginally called Intergalactic Digital Research. (Note: am aware that alleged theft probably came through Tim Paterson's Seattle Computer Products' 86-DOS which Gates bought and turned into DOS with the help of IBM.)

Dan Kurt

Posted by: Dan Kurt at September 9, 2016 6:27 PM

Never made a red cent off'n my ass and I've been using computers since about 1979.

You don't have to scratch too deep to find that apple people are just plain weerd. They'd rather talk than do.

Posted by: ghostsniper at September 9, 2016 7:49 PM

Asked my boss one time why he hired a bunch of DOS/Windows heads to work in a Mac environment. He said it was because he knew we knew how to figure things out & solve problems.

Posted by: leelu at September 10, 2016 9:06 AM

I am an old lady who came into computer use when my son shoved a Windoze, as he calls it, 98 over the transom years ago and I started fooling with it. It made sense to me, I could fix it when it stalled and I learned a whole lot.
I fear that would not have happened with a Mac.
I'm sure Rick is right about the ports and jacks.

Posted by: pbird at September 10, 2016 9:30 AM

Sometimes a phone is just a phone.

My 18 year old son broke his third Iphone screen, in a year. Just being a guy.

He hasnt replaced it in a week, in spite of my offering help to pay.

He says it feels better without it.
I know what he means...

One more glitch due to a frigging "improvement" in my MS smartphone OS, bot just for simplicity and promised seamless sync with my Office software, and I am back to a flip phone.

More trouble than they are worth. This from one of the early adopters all along.

Posted by: foodog at September 10, 2016 9:21 PM

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