Comment by svara
4 years ago
I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past.
The fact that there was this wide open field, where, sure, maybe you paid Microsoft for the OS, but then the rest was up to you. Trade shareware CDs, install stuff from the internet, type in code from a book or whatever, it felt like an infinite open field of possibilities.
I guess it's normal that the exciting frontier shifts around, but I really can't believe that it's somehow a good thing in this case.
You can still do all those things on a computer.
And now it’s so easy to put up a web app that I’d argue barriers are much, much lower than when you had to figure out how to get your physical software distributed.
The goals of “keep grandpa from getting his life savings stolen by malicious software” and “allow a power user to do whatever they want” can literally never be solved by the same device. If there’s any way to disable protections then the scammers will get grandpa to do it. And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.
This is false.
Windows used to be a sieve. The infection rates and general abuse Windows received went down by orders of magnitude once they added UAC and the default malware scanner/antivirus.
And they didn't need to lock down everything, completely.
The rest is an easy money grab from the OS vendors who obviously don't want to remain "dumb pipes".
Before Windows Vista there was no real file permissions.
Linux file permisdions are still kinda rubbish. Move a file from system A to system B and it's oner is no longer Rob, its now Bob because they have the same Id!
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And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.
This kind of thing has become a meme. It's basically irrelevant. If the market of tinkerers was big enough 20 years ago, it's more than big enough now, and the GPU shortage kind of proves that. It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try. There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.
The market for tinkerers is huge. Which is why there is a huge selection of computing products out there that cater almost exclusively to this market. The question is, why should Apple be forced to cater to them as well?
It would be understandable if Apple owned most of the computer/smartphone market, but they don't. iPhones make up less than 20% of smartphones out in the wild. Nobody who wants to avoid Apple is put in a situation where they are at a disadvantage, unlike a telephone user in the 1970's trying to avoid Bell.
> If the market of tinkerers was big enough 20 years ago, it's more than big enough now
It isn't, because the momentum is with big vendors, and big vendors look at economies of scale. Doesn't matter if "tinkerer's market" is 10x as big as it was 20 years ago, when "grandpa's market" is now 100x bigger than that, an every marginal unit of effort is better spent on that than on catering to power users.
> and the GPU shortage kind of proves that.
It doesn't prove the tinkerer's market grew, it's a result of being able to use GPUs to turn electricity directly into money. It's not tinkerers who buy them, it's the business-savvy people. Tinkerers' role is to handle setup.
> It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try.
It's not a fallacy, and it is effective. That's why everyone is doing it. That's why, for example, smartphones are locked down tight and the ecosystem shuns attempts at unlocking them. The pressure is everywhere. Even if the phone vendor lets you root it, your banking app will try to detect it and refuse to run.
> There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.
Can you name some? Because as much as I hate the "sanitized amusement park experience" trend, I honestly can't think of an alternative approach that would work. Past a certain point, security and usability are mutually exclusive - the features needed to protect you from someone impersonating you, or to protect you from getting tricked into self-pwning, are directly restricting what you can do on your own device.
> You can still do all those things on a computer.
Have you tried to distribute software on macOS out of the App Store recently?
Did you try to distribute software out of the App Store 25 years ago?
> I can't help but feel like having it this way is breaking one of the huge reasons that made computers so absurdly exciting and enticing in the past.
We live in a bubble, so it was exciting for us.
The iPhone was exciting for everyone, for the whole world, and in no small part because normal people finally felt confident enough to try all that sweet sweet software that became available thanks to people like you who don't need a safety net to tinker with stuff.
People were still doing iPhone stuff before the iPhone. You had blackberry and palm offering email, internet, games, and mms to the masses and the devices were quite popular for those who could afford them.
The iPhone only became a device for the masses, truly, when carriers started subsidizing the older models for zero down, around the iPhone 4g era. This has continued today where Verizon currently offers the iPhone SE for "$0/mo" like some cheap flip phone of old. Before that, the iPhone was exclusively rich persons phone, and probably still would have been in the U.S. at least (like it is in the rest of the world) had it not been for carrier subsidies and cheaper mobile internet plans (or maybe just the normalization of spending so much on a mobile plan every month). The iPhone didn't even get third party apps until years after launch, and when it did, the most popular of that sweet sweet software during those early days were mostly dumb stuff like apps that make gunshot sounds, or flash game clones. The real gems during that era was software written by the jailbreak community, and a lot of that added functionality was cloned by apple in later OS versions.
quite popular for those who could afford them
Lots of revisionist history here.
Until the iPhone 3G, vast majority of people I knew here in Sydney had Nokias. Getting data was also expensive.
Apple changed all of that here. Affordable plans with data to make a smart phones useful. Then they were everywhere. So it wasn’t a “rich persons” phone here in Australia. Maybe a middle class phone. They also got software updates for years, letting you keep the device longer. Once Android got their act together, I remember all the Android users churning through phones at least once a year because they were so bad.
The iPhone was first launched in Jan 2007. The App Store launched July 2008. So it wasn’t “years” before third party apps either. Most of the useful ones were for public transport, messaging, GPS, maybe a few games.
Don’t let their questionable acts now, cloud your memory of what they did. Apple nailed it with the iPhone. They were the under dog back then and took down all the big players to bring smart phones and digital software purchases to the masses.
> "The iPhone was exciting for everyone, for the whole world"
You live in a buble, most of the world can't afford to spend $1000 on a phone.
The "iPhone revolution", the trend the iPhone started. The majority of the world's population owns an iPhone style smartphone with access to an App Store style software store.
It’s a 15% cut for developers who makes less than $1 million and for most other developers after year 1 on the App Store.
This only happened recently after they've had lawsuits and antitrust suits and Congressional interest.