I am really not liking the whole emphasize-iphoneOS-over everything-else direction of apple recently. I like OSX a lot. I really hope they return to giving it the attention it deserves soon.
Attempting to see all this from as wide a perspective as possible, I think it's only natural given the incredibly fast pace at which mobile is developing right now. The mobile industry is in the middle of a massive renaissance, Apple somehow ended up right at the center of it, and it just makes sense to focus all their resources on it while they have the advantage.
In a few more years, as this new generation of mobile matures, Apple will probably shift back to the desktop as the pieces begin to drift together for the next generation there.
There are obviously cases where a mobile device cannot replace a desktop. For that matter, there are cases where a desktop cannot replace a mainframe computer (bank transaction processing). All technology shifts are about the 90% -- there is always the 10% of jobs that need a mainframe, or a fax machine, or even a telegram.
While I certainly agree with you, I would also point out that OSX is also a very mature platform whereas iPhone OS is in its infancy.
So one could argue that OSX does not need as much hype to spur development, and since it has been around for so long, many of the critical gaps in the application space have been filled on OSX. Whereas there are still many opportunities for mobile device applications that solve problems that are not yet solved.
My intuition is that Apple is beginning to follow a 90-9-1 rule with its offerings, probably not by design but just because that's how the market is actually structured.
The 90-9-1 rule says that 90% of people are going to be consumers/audience, 9% will interact/edit/participate, while only 1% will be doing the actual creation of content for people to interact with or consume.
The desktop Macs are for that 1%. In fact, most computers have been designed to cater to that 1% of coders and creative professionals. Very few computers have been explicitly designed and made for the other 99%. The iPad seems to me to be targeting that 90% that want to be an audience/consumer of content, but are not creators. It's a computing device/appliance finally made specifically with them in mind, rather than with hackers/creators/coders/geeks in mind as the target market.
So, it makes sense that Macs will remain the only way to develop for iPhone OS. Making iPhone OS capable of becoming a development platform would be counter to the entire idea/market of iPhone OS.
Macs may dwindle to 1% of Apple's sales some day, but they'll still sit at the top, trickling down all the content to the rest of the ecosystem.
True, but I think Apple sees this fact as a fortunate artifact of history, rather than as a sacred cow that must be preserved at all costs.
Imagine a world in which Apple never created the Mac, but had instead been formed many years later, with the same people, processes, and design ethic. They'd still have become successful at selling iPhones, iPods, and iPads; nothing about those devices really depends on the Mac legacy, except for the fact that their OS happened to have been developed for the Mac first. In that world, if you walked into Jobs's office today and pitched him on the idea of launching a line of traditional personal computers, he'd say something sarcastic and tell you to GTFO. The idea wouldn't merit five minutes' thought.
I can still recall the shock when the first Windows compatible iPods where released. Ever since then many, many decisions have been made to favour the portable devices over the Mac platform.
Onto whatever makes sense at the time. iPhone OS development will work like game console development does now, where the dev tools are (again, for now) all hosted on Windows.
It makes as much sense for Apple to have their own line of proprietary PCs as it does for Sony. Even Sony understands that.
I agree with you on liking OSX. On the other hand, I'd rather see them put out a great 10.7 when they have been working on it properly, than just putting something half-finished out there despite their current focus on getting the iPhone platform up to speed.
I am hoping for more attention on OSX as well, but I'm not really worried. The ADA are usually targeted on specific (and new) technologies, and the latest technologies like OpenCL and GCD are more useful from a behind-the-scenes-perspective.
I can also imagine the plan being a convergence of the two platforms so that they'll put back some of the new thinking in the iPhone OS into OSX. It wouldn't have made sense to base that work on iPhone OS 3.0 when 4.0 put in as much new stuff as it does. Although, admittedly, a lot of that stuff is already available on the desktop.
I think part of that is because Apple is growing as a content distributor, as long as OS X remains awesome (and gets no app store) I see no problem with that.
Actually, I'd be quite happy if they forgot about OS X and released it as open source to the community (as in BSD licensed). They could still maintain the official version for their hardware, but the community could run it for free, along with fixing bugs for them and developing new features.
What are they going to do with their development platform then? I can see how it makes sense for Apple to drop 'computers' and focus on 'devices,' but they are currently restricting their development platform to Macs. Do you feel that they will be able to create a competent development platform for Windows or Linux? Or do you think that we will all be coding on iPhones/iPads in 10 years?
They created a competent development environment for FreeBSD, so its plausible that they can do it on Windows or Linux. Not that I think it will come to that.
Our computing environment is going through another refactoring. The last big refactoring started with the rise of the web, and its not done yet. The next wave started with the rise of powerful mobile internet devices, and will still be playing out in a decade.
What will we all be coding on in 10 years? Hell if I know, it could be retinal projectors, and neural implants hooked into "the TouchCloud." Or maybe its something running a descendent of the iPhone fork of OS X with full support for huge displays, keyboards, mice, etc.
I can't see using a tablet as a coding platform, but who knows what kind of wacky stuff will happen by the time they get around to retiring the Mac platform.
As mentioned above, though, Windows-hosted development is the rule and not the exception in other industries like game development, which are just as technically demanding (if not far more so) than iPhone OS app development.
The problem is that Apple has never shown any sort of competency in developing stable and/or usable Windows applications. They need their developer tools to stay friendly during such a transition, too. They can't just expect i{Phone,Pad} developers to walk barefoot over broken glass just for the privilege of creating an application for the platform.
{edit} Either that or they are banking on being so entrenched by the time they drop the Mac platform that developers will have no choice but to 'walk barefoot over broken glass' to develop for their mobile platform.
Here's the best argument against that pessimistic view: people at Apple, Steve Jobs very much included, use Macs. They obviously love their macs, and would be very unhappy to be forced to move to windows. Steve Jobs does not want to use Windows, so he'll continue making computers that he wants to use.
Steve Jobs does not want to use Windows, so he'll continue making computers that he wants to use.
Jobs would sell his own liver if that's what it took to own the market he's playing in. (Actually, that might explain a few things...)
He cannot, and will never, own the PC market with the Mac. Vista was his last chance, I think.
OTOH, the portable music player market is a foregone conclusion at this point, and he can, and may, dominate the smartphone market as well, through the incompetence of his adversaries if nothing else. Most great platform success stories -- certainly Microsoft's -- have come about in exactly that way. MS didn't win their Windows and Office monopolies because their products were awesome, they won because everybody else was a goddamned idiot.
It's way too late to defeat Windows. Jobs knows that, and the prospect of continuing the battle must bore him by now.
Good for him. In other news, Steve Jobs is often full of shit.
There are some customers which we chose not to serve.
We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a
piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.
- 2008
We didn't think we'd do well in the cellphone business...
We chose to do the iPod instead of a PDA. - 2003
There are no plans to make a tablet...It turns out people
want keyboards. - 2003
I'm not convinced people want to watch movies on a tiny
little screen. - 2003
Well, first of all, in 2008 there _was_ no way to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk. Not with currently available technology. I'm sure if they could build iPad 5 years earlier at the same price, they would have; the technology wasn't there. Second of all, even Jobs is allowed to change his mind. Calling someone full of shit because 7 years has passed, with technology evolving correspondingly (do you remember the resolution of tiny screens in 2003? I do; cell phone screens were mostly something like 240x360 at most; he was right, at that resolution, the market wanting to see movies in that quality is worthless) is a bit harsh, no?
I've thought about this for the last hour or so, and after thinking about it, I think arguing about the hardware is a red herring.
Suppose the hardware wasn't there in 2008 (which I don't think is strictly true, but OK). Are you really saying that Steve Jobs, with all his secret meetings with Samsung and random manufacturers, isn't aware that it will be available soon?
To put it another way, if the hardware is hard, wouldn't it have taken Apple quite some time to build the stuff? Wouldn't they be working on the iPad, say, two years out, when Jobs was making those statements about $500 tablets?
But I think even that argument in a sense is a red herring. The real issue is "can Jobs change his mind?" Of course he can. But he's notoriously cryptic about what Apple's working on. It's not like he's out talking to industry analysts and is making off-the-cuff comments about Apple's strategy. His statements are calculated and controlled. In fact, I would argue that he is more often "wrong" or "misleading" about new products than he is "accurate", because lots (by percentage) of his forward-looking statements turn out to be inaccurate, at least according to the plain meaning of them. To say that he is changing his mind is to imply that he's really inept his job: figuring out what to build.
But I think even that's not the central issue. Let's say Jobs is just a really whimsical guy, who doesn't know he's working on an iPad until it slaps him in the face on launch day. So all of the quoted statements are just him running his mouth and he really has no product vision years out.
Wouldn't that imply, then, that today Jobs has no idea whether he'll be making a Mac app store or not? So his statement has no real information content?
tl;dr It doesn't matter whether the hardware is hard or what his intent is--to mislead or if he simply doesn't know he's going to make a product. His track record shows that claiming he's not going to do something is a good indicator that he'll do it a few years later.
The original iPhoneOS device prototypes had 8-10 inch screens, were wifi-only, and named "SafariPad". Their work on capacitive multi-touch goes back to their 2005 acquisition of FingerWorks.
They started working on the iPad two years before they released the iPhone :)
Well, change my statement from "no way to make" to "no way to have made, and released by that point in 2008". yes, of course it took them years to build the iPad. I wasn't saying that they weren't working on it at that point.
My point was that of course they've been working on it, but it was not possible to have completed it and released it in 2008. If it had been, some other company would have done it; so far though, both with phones and with tablet computers, Apple hardware (at least in the US, not talking about Japan) seems to be right on the edge of what is possible - all the modern touch-screen phones [droid, pre, nexus, motorola, etc] started coming out after the iPhone release; same as we will now see with all the new tablets.
Of course one could argue that the other manufacturers just weren't sure of the market, and only rushed in to fill in the gaps after Apple has proven that there is a demand for that kind of hardware, but I don't think that's realistic - if it was technically feasible for HP or Microsoft to release a kick-ass tablet before Apple, I'm sure they would've jumped at the chance. They hadn't.
As to changing his mind - that was referring to his statements from 2003, and I am saying that in that time his statements were reasonable. Just because 7 years passed doesn't mean that he has to stick by them.
Anyway, this is getting too long. Just thought your statements were strangely harsh.
The real issue is that your thesis is flimsy and hinges on selective quoting and ignorance of context. Here is but one example:
when Jobs was making those statements about $500 tablets?
He wasn't. Here is the original transcript from which your first quote was pulled. It is not about tablets, and only by implication is it even about the idea of an "Apple netbook", the prevalent rumor of the day.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein
And then you had also mentioned the price umbrella statement and you said look, certainly to be successful on iPhone, we don’t want to create a price umbrella. I think in response to another question, you also talked about extraordinary feature functionality in terms of your Mac products. Do you have the same philosophy around Mac as you do with iPhone, that you have to be careful not to create an umbrella in each? So I guess the simple question is should we continue to see more affordable price points across the Mac product family and across iPhone going forward?
Steven P. Jobs
Well, I think what we want to do is deliver a lot, an increasing level of value to these customers. There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve and there’s a lot of them. And we’ve seen great success by focusing on certain segments of the market and not trying to be everything to everybody. So I think you can expect us to stick with that winning strategy and continuing to try to add more and more value to those products in those customer bases we choose to serve. Does that make sense to you?
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein
Yes, it does. I mean, I guess, if I could follow-up, you did in this case add more value in terms of feature functionality with your notebook by actually lowering the price, so you retained the features but lowered the price. Certainly in terms of the new notebooks, you retained the price and added more features.
Steven P. Jobs
Correct.
Toni Sacconaghi - Sanford Bernstein
Can we expect you to continue to attract more customers by doing both, both adding more features at the same price and lowering price and retaining the same features?
Steven P. Jobs
Well, we like to attract new customers but you will just have to wait and see.
> Well, first of all, in 2008 there _was_ no way to make a $500 computer that wasn't a piece of junk.
In the very tautological sense that it wasn't "possible" until Apple did it, yes. In the sense that we've made some great discovery which has somehow encheapened the silicon, no. It's hard to do because design is hard, not because the tech wasn't there (although there have certainly been tech improvements).
> cell phone screens were mostly something like 240x360 at most
The iPhone just about doubles the pixels for (on many devices) approximately the same screen area. Is it better? Yes. Is it revolutionary? Hardly. And anyway, Jobs' purported objection was not to the resolution but to the physical size.
Remember how badly touchscreens sucked before the advent of capacitive multitouch. Until it became practical to build tablet-sized iPhone screens, it simply was not practical to build a decent tablet, period.
I think this was very misinterpreted. The question was, "There's a rumor saying there will be a Mac App Store and no software without authorization from Apple will run on Mac OS X. Is that true?"
His response was "Nope." And everyone appeared to be in a frenzy saying "No app store for OS X" when in reality that does not actually shoot down the possibility. Since the question takes the conjunctive form, his nope could be to either one of those statements. Everyone assumed it meant no app store for OS X, but it could just as well mean that there will not be a requirement of Apple authorization to run apps on OS X.
A minor technicality, I'm sure, but I would not be the least bit surprised to see an App store on OS X, just not the authoritarian, single point of app installing beast that is the iPhone/iPad app store.
I can't help wondering if all the regular app reviewers have been pulled to help with iPhone and iPad app reviews. The Apple Downloads section hasn't been updated in weeks, and now this.
As a Mac developer, this feels like a major blow. Sure, I understand that the iPhone OS stuff is the new shiny and the spotlight is going to be on it, but lately it feels like Apple is just coasting on the Mac side. It makes me seriously question if I'm writing apps for the right platform.
If it's time to reevaluate platforms, then it's time to take a look at all the possibilities again, not just the ones made by Apple. The iPad looks great, but then again, so does the web.
As a two time ADA winner, and having a new app almost ready for this years wwdc we're pretty bummed out about this. As one developer put it, it feels like the end of an era. We love the Mac desktop, but Apples current attitude towards it is very bad for developer morale and will make us definitely think twice on what platform we'll build our next project.
Seriously not cool. But it IS true, there haven't been a ton of groundbreaking apps on the Mac this year, and I say that as a Mac developer. Still, they could have given an award to best Mac companion app for an iPhone app, and/or best developer tool (Accessorizer FTW).
Looks like the scientific computing poster session has been dropped this year too.
I really don't like the deemphasis of OSX in favor of iPhone OS. The iPhone is great for mobility because it strips computing down to the core, but it has a LOOONNGG way to go before it can toe up with OSX or Windows when it comes to productivity, IMO.
ps. I'm a mac fanboy at heart, but i try to remain objective about consumer technology for the "masses". Outside of the tech ecosphere, the world is a very different place.
Well, in my view, "desktop" computing has been stagnant for a couple decades.
Maybe that's too harsh. Web browsers helped move things along for a while, as did 3D gaming. But really, a UI with windows and a pointer that I interact with using a single mouse and keyboard is pretty played out.
Apple has a steady market single-digit market share in personal computers - a cash cow. Yet they have a growing, serious, and volatile market share in mobile devices - a star.
I'm actually wondering if this indicates the possibility of a small Mac-focused developers conference in Apple's future. There was quite a bit of grumbling last year at WWDC from Mac developers because of the heavy focus on iPhone technologies.
I can understand a lessened focus given how popular iPhone and iPad are right now, but the shunning of Mac apps completely from the ADAs makes me think we'll see a Mac-only conference soon.
Makes sense to me. There's just not much exciting innovative stuff happening on the desktop these days. Good apps get marginally better all the time but is that worthy of an award?
