[junklight]

Do you know what - in my house I have a number of machines. They do things like cleaning clothes and dishes and making food hotter. They all have microprocessors in them and can do quite sophisticated stuff - but their interface - almost always a single dial. And that's great because I don't actually care how they do it I just want the job done. Yes I am technically capable of getting in their and reprograming the chips but why would I?

And this is the thing - there is no reason why half the things on my computer should be hard. When I am working with documents (text , video , music , etc) then I just want to easily open the document and work on it. I want backups to be trivial etc. etc. And what is more 99% of users want this and only this.

But the great thing about the mac is that if you look at the SDKs there is ever more sophistiation and "cool" stuff for us developers. Terminal had a lot of love this time round, Xcode might not have the greatest UI but it also gets a lot of attention - Apple take developers seriously

It doesn't bother me that my computer is powerful and easy to use. I don't think this is a bad thing and I also think all the people reading into this "oh the mac is going to just be for idiots" are idiots themselves: go and download the SDKs and XCode and then tell me that Apple are dumbing down

I do think that Apple are moving away from the "pro" market BTW - they have their sights on something much more interesting - the pervasive computing future when most of our computing needs are met by a cloud of little machines. I already love that I can walk into a room in my house and flick up stuff from my phone or ipad onto my TV or walk into another room and make music appear from said phone or iPad. There will come a day when your "computer" is a coming together of screen , processor unit and keyboard and when you get up taking the processor with you that computer is no longer physically there until next time you come past. We are going to see this in the video game world too - we aren't far from an ipad or iphone that is your portable gaming device and when you are near your TV is your console and when you are with your mates is your lan party (with or without screens and speakers) - and if Microsoft and Sony aren't paying attention they will loose the entire market overnight

[icebraining]

The gap between turning a simple dial and having to code something up (even a bash script - and are the Mac APIs bash accessible?) is very deep, though, and lots of people don't have neither the time nor inclination to cross that gap. And frankly, why should them?

On the other hand, my washing machine does have about twenty buttons, so I may be the wrong person to talk about that.