| The iPad has really brought out a lot of old, crochety "well in my day" engineers that are now to the point where its embarassing. The iPad will draw more people towards software engineering, because for the first time we will have a general purpose computer that doesn't suck horribly for normal people. It will be cool. It will be fun. Passion for software has little to do with how much you can "hack" down to the hardware. It has to do with curiousity, drive, and interest. The iPad is going to increase these. Any lack of hackability out of the box that is really interesting will be overcome by these kids, I think people posting about this are thinking these darn youngins will never figure out how to jailbreak their iPads. Odds are though, they just won't care, because being able to root the filesystem is pretty boring compared to what you can do for a $99 dev kit. The development environment for the iPhone is perfect for learning. None of the bullshit, all of the good stuff so you can get results quickly. Apple should simply make it so you can get a dev license as a student for free, or really cheap ($99 is arguably already pretty cheap considering it includes the App Store services.) Kids will be able to write apps for the iPad and get them into the App Store. Now their non-tech savvy friends, and everyone in the world, will be able to get them in one tap. This will be absolutely phenomenal for re-kindling the fire of curiosity and passion for building more stuff. When I was learning, I was lucky if a few dozen local nerds on BBSes tried out my programs. Now a clever teenager could conceivably become a millionaire. Now, what if they want to go deeper? What if they want to use "undocumented APIs"? They can, of course, but can't share their work through the App Store. (They can share it with friends via Ad Hoc) What if they want to really hack the thing beyond what they can do in an app's sandbox? They can, of course, jailbreak. This is a much better world for getting young kids excited about engineering. I personally think Apple could not pull off the computer revolution they are poised to do with an open system. Just look at the Jailbroken iPhone ecosystem for an idea of what that would look like. It's great if you're a hacker, but it would have destroyed the platform. Instead of complaining about not being able to root your iPad, complain about the fact Apple is not talking about how they're going to use the iPad to get kids excited about programming. |
Why do people insist that 'jail-breaking' is some sort of valid option?
* If Apple had their way even jail-breaking would be illegal.
* Jail-breaking is dependent on security holes in the operating system (i.e. the same way that you are jail-breaking your iPhone is the same way that blackhats could take it over)
* Jail-breaking breaks on most updates.
Why do people think that it is impossible for Apple to make some sort of button that says, "Yes. I want to enter 'tinker mode' my iPhone/iPad. I realize that this will void my software (maybe hardware?) support from Apple."
[EDIT]
> Just look at the Jailbroken iPhone ecosystem for an idea of what that would look like. It's great if you're a hacker, but it would have destroyed the platform.
That's a strawman. If the system was open, would all of those Apps on the AppStore right not just vanish? People wouldn't have bothered to develop for the iPhone at all? What about the people that didn't develop neat apps for the iPhone (that are impossible under the SDK) because the 'jail-broken' community is so small and not officially sanctioned? (Or just because of all of the issues with jail-breaking I mentioned above?)