Apple is the evil empire, stupid

The iPhone will be the nail in the coffin for Apple's credibility.

I have hated Apple ever since I tried to get AAC files to work on a new MP3 player, then a new pc.

I hated Apple even more when I tried to play iTunes tracks in an opensource media player.

Lock-in! Proprietary formats! No flexibility! The bastards.

Yet I was a voice in the wilderness. Whenever I asked either developers or other consumers they loved Apple.  The iPod was a piece of achingly beautiful design. Steve Jobs was cool.  Macs kicked Microsoft's proprietary ass.

The iPhone is changing everything. Developers are beginning to hate Apple and I think consumers will be next.

What's the problem with iPhone?

Mike Arrington at FOWA was half way there today when he said Apple is pissing people off by limiting them to one network.

I think there's a much bigger problem. The genius of the iPhone is that it provides an interface for people like my dad to access and use mobile apps. The problem is how hard it is to do this.

Great technologists like Sutha  are livid that developers can't even officially write to the OS X layer.  They're officially limited to a not-so-rich web-browser in which they can build very simple apps, but that can't take advantage of any of the power of the iPhone. These apps can't run offline, can't take a
peek at your address book, or anything else. They certainly can't do any of the slick graphical things that are making people generally salivate over the iPhone.  You CAN create native OS X apps that do much more but this means hacking the iPhone.

So my dad can have some widgets but they're not really useful.

In essence Apple is going against all the principals of openness and interoperability that so dismays developers and eventually consumers.

And now hallelujah! People are starting to dislike Apple. I am pleased for two reasons:
1)Wonderful opportunities for entrepreneurs.
2) Finally I feel vindicated ;)

Comments

[Tom Scott]

May be. But there are a couple of other things going on here that may be strategically very sensible for Apple, users and developers.

Other 'phones provide a JVM to allow third party apps to be written - the trouble is they suck. They are slow because they are built in a sandbox which means you are doomed to running at a fraction of the speed of the underlying platform, and you cut yourself off from the cool features that are available to the main platform. I’ve still never seen a Java app for phones that's integrated with the phone’s features e.g. the camera, contacts list, SMS etc. IMHO zippy widgets win hands down.

Yeah sure Apple could expose their API - but in doing so they may be doing a deal with the devil. Just check out what happens with Palm and third party apps - they are - all too often - nasty, unstable rubbish that crash the whole OS. Apple appear to have traded stability and speed for third party apps. This is more or less what they did with the Mac.

Now this may not be a problem. In the medium term, there is a clear move to deliver applications over the web, there is also a move towards ubiquitous, high bandwidth mobile access.

What this means for developers is they can build their apps once - on the server - and deliver it via the browser/widget to the desktop and mobile (this is why Apple released Safari for Windows). This is much better, for developers, than having to support a separate code base for Windows, OSX, Linux, Palm etc. etc.

[Andrzej]

I believe the main reason why apple is locking its systems (both macosx and iphone) is software consistency and side effects.

The basic idea is that if you give away too much control over the core of your system, then you end-up with myriads of unsecure applications. If you need examples - see how windows looks like these days.

Instead, apple was always allowing only limited integration with its systems. Of course - you can still write some applications for mac, and communicate with the system core through provided API, but you don't have possibility to really change the core itself. Thats why Apple used to be so much more stable than windows.

In case of iphone its the same case - they just don't want every kid on the block to write sh*#ty apps, they want to have control over what people are writing and how secure it is - in order to be able to say: yes, its stable, we guarantee that.

There's no evil in this, its just customer service. Just like when you go to the restaurant you want someone (chef) to have control over what all the cooks are cooking.

[Jason Ball]

You're just jealous that Mike *had* an iPhone.

November 9th man. Get your AAC files ready...they'll work perfectly on you new iPhone. :-)

[Prefabrik]

In the aftermath of upgrading my iPhone to 3.0 I spoke to Apple, AT&T and Yahoo!, trying to resolve multiple problems with the upgrade. The only rep who was evasive and unhelpful was the Apple rep. AT&T, for as much flack as they get (and largely deserve) was incredibly helpful. Yahoo! rep was amazed that Apple was blaming Yahoo! for a bug which was clearly the result of Apple's code push.

While obviously this incident is separate from the anti-competitive app store flack and the unsustainability of the cool club/scrappy underdog brand, for me there is a common thread: Apple has power that was once inconceivable and while their culture and communications may not yet reflect an acknowledgment of that power, their users do.