Is the iPhone a Preview of What's to Come in OS X and on the Mac?
In an excellent article called “Welcome to iPhone: Your Crappy Mac of Tomorrow, Today!”, Mike Ash recounts his experiences with an iPod Touch and details the frustrations of the platform from a user perspective. And he worries that OS X and the Mac platform are going to move in a direction that merges them with the iPhone/iPhoneOS — one that will be very detrimental to what the Mac platform has become. (I’ve written about a similar theme before) This is probably the best article I’ve read on this topic and so I’m going to egregiously quote the best parts here:
But my big fear, what prompts me to write this article, is that this is just a preview of bigger things to come. Specifically, I think that Apple is going to start pushing Mac OS X in the same direction as the iPhone. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but over the next few years…
Apple’s focus and attention seems to be on the iPhone, and the sentiment coming out of Cupertino is one that the iPhone is good, all of the stupid, crippling restrictions on how it works are good, and Apple always knows best. After all, what platform got basically 100% of the attention at this year’s WWDC keynote, and what platform got 0% of the attention? Hint: the desktop Mac you are probably reading this post on is not in the 100% category….
The iPhone is not just a crappy platform. It’s a crappy platform which may very well turn our beloved Mac OS X into a crappy platform too. Right now Apple has two platforms. One of them is powerful, rich with history, open to any development, and hacker friendly. One of them is deliberately crippled, difficult to use for any kind of advanced tasks, will not accept code without the Apple Official Seal of Approval, and is extremely hacker unfriendly. The latter platform also has all of Apple’s love and attention right now….
Yeah, I’m angry. I’m tired of being fed crap and being told that it’s caviar. I’m a very long-time Apple user, and I don’t think that they are going in the right direction with any of this stuff. And no, the fact that several million people are willing to plunk down hundreds of dollars for an iPhone 3G of their very own is not going to convince me otherwise.
A-fucking-men to that, brother.
