[bad_user]

The most interesting thing about these recent trends is human nature.

I remember back in year 2000/2001 how everybody was talking about freedom, open-source and the open nature of the Internet. I remember how the closed garden that Microsoft tried to create was frowned upon. Small companies that were picking the Internet as a delivery platform and using open-source/multi-platform technologies were on the forefront of innovation. Of course regular consumers and businesses never cared, but as Paul Graham once said, if you want to see the future trends in computing, you have to look at what hackers are using today.

Then OS X happened, this UNIX-compatible OS that was shiny and cool and all of your UNIX tools were compatible with it and you could run some pretty important proprietary software too, like MS Office or Photoshop. It was more productive for developers than Windows. Compared to Linux it was friendlier to all people. And suddenly Apple was hip again and it slowly captured the hearts of developers.

Then the iPhone happened and people didn't mind that it was a closed garden, because there has never been anything like it. Anything that Apple allowed on this new platform, it was taken as a gift, as it was their platform, so if they wanted to ban an app for "duplicating existing functionality" then openness be damned, it was their product after all. Then the stories about lone developers getting rich on the App Store happened, and people didn't mind being at the behest of Apple, as long as they could have some piece of that awesome pie.

Of course, countless of reasons were given by tech pundits, trying to rationalize the walled garden they've created - it is better for grandmas that have their PCs ridden with viruses, it is better for the protection of our children, it exposes computing to a wider mass (even though computing in this context means mostly consumption), it solves the problem of app marketing for individual developers without huge marketing budgets, etc... there's always some reason for why Apple was right to act the way it did. Even now that they've released a shitty GMaps replacement, some genuinely believe that they had no choice, when for a company like Apple there are always choices available.

Let's not forget for a moment the ultimate argument against this closed garden: if you don't like it, you are free to go somewhere else.

And now Apple started suing left and right, which in my opinion is what companies do when finding themselves in the innovator's dilemma, and is doing so while dropping the ball on new versions of its products. They are still successful and they might produce some more golden eggs in the future, but the innovation frenzy of the iPod era is over and they know it.

And yet people still cheer for them, even though as far as openness is concerned, Apple makes Microsoft look good. And it was only 12 years ago that people hated Microsoft with a passion for being an obstacle to innovation, even though Microsoft never banned any app from running on Windows or restricted its usage only to certain hardware (but surprise, since Apple has been doing it so successfully, Microsoft is going to start doing it with Windows 8 ... hurray for the renewed and totally not evil Microsoft).

I own an Android phone and an iPad. I love my iPad, but it was a gift and I secretly yearn for a Nexus tablet that has the same size + 3G. I also voted with my wallet against apps like Instagram, because I'm primarily an Android user and the aesthetic senses of developers like Marco don't really solve any my problems.

I also remember the day I got my Galaxy S, even though I owned an iPhone 3GS ... I got out of my way to buy one out of frustration because Apple was banning apps for blocking calls and SMS messages from specific phone numbers (but hey, look how it "just works"). And I predict similar frustration levels as use-cases for my iPad are unfolding. Already I'm pretty pissed off about my carrier having the ability to enable/disable the tethering option on my iPad.

If this is the future of computing, then I shudder to think of the consequences.

[Nrsolis]

Wow. This captures my feelings almost to a "T".

I have an iPhone4 (replacing a 3GS), an iPad3 (replacing an original iPad), and a Macbook Air (replacing a MacBookPro15) and I'm starting to get very nervous about AAPL.

I'm concerned that they are loving towards locking down OS X in a similar fashion to iOS. I wasn't particularly fond of the walled-garden but it was such an improvement that I put up with it. No other products really matched the level of integration that I was craving. A faustian bargain, really.

My wife just got me a Nexus 7 tablet. I find myself really enjoying it. It's thin and light and very, very fast.

And more importantly, it's open. I run Linux on my home servers and I really enjoy Linux as an operating environment. It's just that as a "daily-driver" OS, it's just too rough around the edges to really be at the same level as something like OS X. Android is probably the first example of a truly user-friendly UI for Linux. (note: I know that Android isn't really Linux; I'm making a point about openness and fit/finish/integration)

Anyhow, I'm really conflicted about upgrading to the iPhone5. On one hand, my relationship with AAPL has been pretty good from a customer-relations standpoint. On the other hand, I'm frustrated by the design compromises that seem to be made largely for the convenience/profit of AAPL than their users.

[rolux]

I'm having similar concerns, and I think both your post and the parent post are indicative of a trend that, in hindsight, will have begun just around 2011/12.

And as someone who remembers (and was part of) the first phase of migration to Apple/OS X, around 2001/02, it seems to me that it had less momentum and was harder to envision than the migration from Apple that may be in its infancy now.

(Note: "migration from" doesn't imply losing market share, or even a lower growth rate. It rather means that a specific, tiny but crucial slice of mind share may have begun to erode.)

[zmmmmm]

> indicative of a trend that, in hindsight, will have begun just around 2011/12

I think the very beginnings of it were earlier. The moment Apple jumped the shark was when they banned apps not originally written in C/ObjC from the app store. In that moment they made it virtually impossible to be a geek with any credibility and not be at least a little embarrassed to be an Apple fan. They reversed their decision but it was too late - geeks flooded into Android and the Android market increased its app count by about 400% in the ensuing months. Ever since then I've noticed that my geek friends who carry iPhones have been defensive about it - they say things to rationalize why they aren't carrying a real geek phone.

[cageface]

That was exactly the turning point for me too. I was uneasy about handing them so much control but was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt given their history and their roots in BSD.

But this decision showed they were willing to make heavy-handed and capricious decisions at users' and developers' expense and revealed the dark side of Apple's policy of total control of their platform.

[rimantas]

After reading this comment I am really glad I am not some "geek". I am a programmer, developer, whatever, but I hope I will never turn into geek like one described here.

[cageface]

So you prefer to have some corporation dictating what tools you can use, even if other tools are equally or even more productive for your work? Even if this policy has as much to do with their business agenda as it does with any technical concerns?

[slurgfest]

I can understand that you like Apple products and will stick by them, but I don't understand the kind of disgust you express about being the kind of person that doesn't like Apple products.

Is it a product, or a tribe?

[boboblong]

As a geek, believe me, the feeling is mutual.

[no_more_death]

Sorry, but your comment did nothing to convince the person above. In fact, you may have just turned a middle-of-the-roader into a lifelong enemy of your cause. I'm sorry if I'm beating up on you but this problem is huge in our circles.

Can we get off our snark and get people on our side instead? Comments should elevate others instead of showing off our sarcasm.

[watmough]

I think the migration from Apple just hit my wife.

I've been an iPhone user since day 1, made some money on the app store, and my wife followed with the iPhone 3G, then my cast-off iPhone 4 when the 4S came out.

Now though, after I bought her a Nexus 7, she mentioned that she'd happily get an Android phone now. That's quite an indicator, and probably occurring all over the US. Google really hit it out of the park with the N7.

[mitjak]

It's interesting how I am in the same exact boat as you and everyone up the thread to the original commenter as far being basically fed up with Apple's shit. I am also quite glad indeed that there are now alternatives for those of us who do care about the UX, and my favourite of them is Gnome 3.

It's received a lot of bad press, but I feel like the majority of it is by the more hardcore Linux users who are understandably not used to the carpet being yanked from underneath them. I am still amazed, after an entire summer of using it, about just how much Gnome 3 has re-thought in terms of its UI. The experience is not without bumps and is definitely buggy in places, but I feel like it's the first open-source shell which places user experience at the top of its priority list.

EDIT: there are rumours Ubuntu 12.10 will come in a vanilla Gnome 3 flavour, as opposed to Unity. A "pure" Gnome 3 Debian is all I personally ever need to stay happy, particularly on my Apple hardware that (for now?) supports loading non-OSX operating systems.

[Nrsolis]

If someone out there made a decent laptop with upgradable components and a retina-quality display, I'd probably switch in a moment.

[josephcooney]

What do you mean by "upgradable components"? Apple aren't looking too good in this regard of late.

[stan_rogers]

I believe that was the point -- Apple has "decent" and "Retina-quality display" covered, and that may be somewhat lacking (in the GP's opinion) elsewhere, while the lack of upgradability on the Apple side is an incentive to switch. Get all three requirements covered in a single machine, though...

[Nrsolis]

Right. That was my point. I'm not happy with the path that Apple is taking here. The non-configurability/repairability of the newer laptops along with the ever-increasing closing of the platform gives me pause.

I was looking at the Lenovo Carbon X1 as a possible candidate to replace the Macbook Air I'm currently using but it's not all-the-way-there yet. At least, not for me.

I'm hoping that the other manufacturers catch up soon.

[bluedanieru]

Android isn't really Linux

Huh? It's Linux. It's just not GNU/Linux.

[Nrsolis]

Yeah. I think that's what I meant to say. I'm still a bit hazy on all the components of the Android platform but AFAIK, the Linux kernel is only the most basic part of the whole thing with the VM and associated parts a larger percentage of the whole package.

[w1ntermute]

The "whole package" is called GNU/Linux, because only the kernel is Linux proper. You'll never hear rms calling for people to call Android GNU/Linux, because it uses different software for that part.

[loup-vaillant]

RMS definitely was right to insist on "GNU/Linux" for GNU systems, though: we have proof now that some people who can tell a kernel from an OS can't express themselves clearly when they do need to communicate that distinction.

[jlgreco]

Exactly. For years I did not see the point in "GNU/Linux" as a term. I understood why he wanted it called that, and sympathised with him, but I lacked a reason to actually care.

Now though the distraction is useful. I use GNU/Linux on my servers, desktops, and laptops, and I use Android/Linux on my phone. The terminology now makes conversation easier, instead of more cumbersome.

[jiggy2011]

Maybe it would have made more sense to try and just call it "GNU", "Gunoo-slash-linucks" is just too big of a mouthful.

[api]

OSX demonstrates the power of design. Apple is a fashion company. Freedom is all good, but not if it looks like shit, and pretty much everything but Apple (at least as of the mid-2000s) looked like shit.

I am pleased with the overall design philosophy direction that Unity and Gnome 3 have taken in abandoning the 90s clutterbuck desktop in favor of something cleaner and more fluid, but both are immature. But if they can pull it together, and can be combined with the "ultrabook" movement to make non-Apple laptops not look like shit, then we might have something.

Also, look into cheap Chinese tablets like the "a-pad." If these could be flashed to run an open platform, then we'd have something there too.

But the big problem remains design. OSS is very good at innovation and infrastructure, but is very, very, VERY poor at user experience.

[marklindhout]

>> OSS is very good at innovation and infrastructure, but is very, very, VERY poor at user experience.

I agree with you here. As a designer, I have helped out FLOSS projects with UX design and usability. However, the environment is such that if you would suggest UX could be improved, the response often is that devs feel insulted because you are dissing their code (which is not the case, but they don't see that).

On the other hand, taking a look at WordPress, they invested quite some time in user testing and improving UX by professionals, and that makes it one of the most usable web publishing platforms out there.

So, it would be too easy to say all FLOSS is bad at UX, but most developers don't even see it as an actual discipline, and hence do not see a problem.

Nicer devs, that's the key :)

[slurgfest]

As a designer, I'm sure you recognize that not all feedback from someone who calls himself a designer is going to have equal quality, and shouldn't automatically get a pass. Also, you surely must know that a lot of design and UX critique is highly subjective...

Since you are here, I think you probably also understand that sometimes a complete redesign amounts to a large quantity of boring work, and that an open source developer might have set other priorities for future improvement, or just not see that much return on the time investment relative to other things which remain to be done.

The word for someone who is really nice to you and changes the whole project at your whim is 'employee' or 'contractor.' If I devised and have worked on an OSS project for years and some guy comes out of the blue basically saying that I should reallocate months of free labor in order to make something to someone else's tastes, can you not see why that would be the sort of suggestion I would take with a big grain of salt?

[slurgfest]

When the iMacs first came out, they were being lauded for their style. Of course, now that style looks horribly dated.

But people were always praising Apple products as good design, good user experience, even on the stuff we think is old and busted now.

The reason the recent Apple stuff looks cool now is that it is still the recent Apple stuff. In 10 years, it will look dated because it is so stylized, while things which are styled in a way which is 'boring' will still just be boring 10 years from now.

This should be an indicator that making things not "look like shit" is at least as much a matter of sensing or directing the style of the time, as it is fulfilling some objective criterion for good looks.

[derleth]

That's not universal, though: Apple is literally unusable for me and others because of design decisions that you can't really fix, simply because Apple.

It's high-handed. It's dictating to the user, and it's a reason (not the only reason) Apple won't ever be the only player in any market it enters.

[slurgfest]

Agreed!

For some people Apple's conventions align with their tastes, or clash with their tastes. I think many more people have a meta-preference to have everything just decided and encapsulated for them (sometimes literally encapsulated: not 'having to worry about' battery replacement, for example). These people greatly outnumber the people with a meta-preference to have everything customizable, or open source, or whatever.

If our culture becomes more technically savvy, then I think there will be a higher value placed on systems which offer sane defaults and present few degrees of freedom up-front (like Apple) BUT do provide hatches for users to get more control (like Apple alternatives).

[microtonal]

Or summarized: people will argue in favor of and cheer for whatever is trendy that day.

We should not fool ourselves, we live in a bubble - the outside world is mostly boring Windows XP business desktops, Android smartphones, and Nokia featurephones ;).

[nessus42]

> And yet people still cheer for them, even though as far as openness is concerned, Apple makes Microsoft look good. And it was only 12 years ago that people hated Microsoft with a passion for being an obstacle to innovation,

The reason why people don't hate Apple the way that they hated Microsoft is for three reasons: (1) Apple actually makes a great product, unlike Microsoft at the time. (2) Apple innovates unlike Microsoft at the time. And (3) Apple is never going to have a monopoly, like Microsoft did.

If there's a monopoly to be had, the future is already written, and it belongs to Android.

[burgreblast]

Disagree.

MS was the incumbent 800 lb gorilla, and was proposing locking up identity and payment for the great new space of internet--blocking all new comers. Whereas Apple's actions were framed as underdog & come-from-behind. Today, MS is still characterized as a villan, but now with a bumbling "Home Alone" veneer.

Never mind that Apple, Google and FB have long overstepped MS's original passport plans with more even more ("friendly!") lock in, or that that FF & Chrome overturned consumer protections like ("hard to set!") P3P advertising policy headers so more info could flow back via adwords everywhere.

So if the future belongs to Android, remember that platform is first a giant magnet to collect and funnel info to GOOG, and secondly a phone.

[nessus42]

How does that disagree with what I said?

[chii]

you can't call android a monopoly. thats like saying server is monopolized by GNU/linux.

[nessus42]

You make it sound as if there's any doubt that Google will continue to control Android for the foreseeable future. There is none.

[danmaz74]

What about Amazon's Kindle Fire?

[nessus42]

Amazon is not going to wrest control of Android away from Google.

[enraged_camel]

I think danmaz was trying to say that Android's monopoly does not mean anything because its ecosystem is so thoroughly fragmented. It does not seem to be getting any better either, when you have major content providers like Amazon forking it to distribute their own content.

[gurkendoktor]

> even though computing in this context means mostly consumption

I never understand this argument, will watching iTunes U and reading Instapaper make me dumber because it's "consumption"? Are today's iPhone users not "producing" when posting pictures to Facebook just like we were, uploading pictures to GeoCities a decade ago?

[dakrisht]

Couldn't agree more with everything you stated.

I think we're prime for a change, and as the OP's article suggests, it's coming.

Hopefully it's a change for openness, freedom, and the empowered user. The pendulum will swing in our favor as long as we do something about it and not just "expect" Cupertino to release an iPhone 10 that will be the "greatest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone" (seriously?).

It's interesting to see how Apple is becoming very much like Microsoft recently. The closed (and getting more closed) ecosystem, with additions such as Gatekeeper on OS X ML and the Nazi-like regime in the iOS App Store. The lawsuits left and right, the lack of innovation. Quite frankly, I don't really remember Microsoft exhibiting such arrogance - something you see more from Oracle, but let's forget the Enterprise for a minute.

I think Apple's walled garden is getting taller and taller, but there's a bigger problem: consumerism just doesn't care. The people who waited days to get the new iPhone - they don't care. They just go forward, like a heard of sheep, whatever Apple says, they do. They applaud and are deeply caught up entranced in the "magic."

I don't think (hope) the future of computing lies with Apple, iOS, consumerism, the RIAA, shit bills introduced by gov't to limit the web, and etc. I think the INTERNET is still run by hackers, engineers, people who live and breathe code, we built this thing damn it and we're going to pass it on to our kids, beter, more open, more robust than ever before. The freedom of information, the ability to share and communicate, the ability to create better worlds through software, it's all there - the fact that Apple and Jobs added a golden veil of design doesn't mean it's lost - just skewed at the moment. It's business and dollars, and people like their closed iOS, gatekeeper, iPhone and "the New iPad."

I have tons of respect for a company like Google who try to stay open in the hostile, big-business consumerism-dominated technology sector. They encourage innovation, they want the Internet to grow as an ecosystem, open, fast and easily accessible for everyone.

Technology is about choices and while we're getting less and less from Cupertino with their Nazi-like regime (including dwindling innovation), there is a lot of positive innovation left and right. From Shenzhen alleys producing $35 A-Pads, to Linux boxes like the Rasberry Pi, to thousands of different Android devices - we are prime for change and a breakthrough from the sandbox.

We just have to work hard and do it.

[slurgfest]

Small point - however bad it may be, App Store policies cannot be 'Nazi-like,' unless the App Store has mounted a putsch, invented a pretext for invading the Sudetenland, begun an ethnic cleansing campaign, etc.

[drumdance]

All good points. Another thing that amazes me is how Facebook has quietly reinvented the AOL keyword and Microsoft Passport. Many, many web sites essentially outsource their login and account creation to Facebook. And advertisers often mention their Facebook url instead of their web site.

[pippy]

Comparing Apple's walled garden to Microsoft's is comparing apples to pears. Not being able to open a .doc on another word processor is different from stopping grandma from opening funnycatpicsnotvirus.app

I like to see things from the benefit to the consumer. Microsoft stagnated the computing world for 10 years by failing to innovate. Apple is suing because (let's face it) competitors are jumping on their gravy train and not deviating from their successful designs.

Yes suing is douchy, but to me it's better than the FUD and EEE.

[TruthElixirX]

>I like to see things from the benefit to the consumer. Microsoft stagnated the computing world for 10 years by failing to innovate.

Microsoft accelerated computing by 30 years by making computer hardware a commodity in the 80s and bringing it to the masses.

[zmonkeyz]

Don't forget that when the IPhone happened Apple intended any "applications" to be web applications which is why they spent so much time on getting mobile Safari right. It was the developers who demanded local apps and settled for the closed garden.

[gonzo]

Well, that's one view.

Another is that the SDK wasn't fit for public consumption in Summer 2007.

Nor would reasonable apps have worked all that well on 2007-series hardware.

But.. you have to start somewhere.

[simplesimpl3]

Great comment. "trying to rationalize..." I think that really says it all. Human nature indeed.

It's certainly not rational.