Apple’s “pro” apps : iLife suite :: MacBook Pro : iPad
A lot of people are asking me what I think of the walled garden approach and whether I think Apple is evil and/or planning to put the iPhone OS on their laptops any time soon, or forcing all OSX apps to go through the App Store. For instance, I loved the BSD-based Pre, and I am a huge fan of open platforms and being able to tinker. This seems at odds with Apple’s latest series of moves (including the banning of intermediate representation layers), and so people who know me are confused that I’m still an Apple fan.
Unless I’ve missed something, I’m pretty sure Apple is just doing in hardware what they’ve done in software for years.
For years, we’ve had extremely powerful media applications provided for free with every Mac. The latest incarnation is the iLife suite, which allows you to futz around with digital photography, digital videography, audio recording & editing, web design, etc. These apps are very low cost: free with a machine, or $79 as a bundle if you buy them without a machine. They are also very powerful; with them, you can do pretty much anything you need to do and could very well put out professional videos, sound recordings, websites, and hardbound photo albums using nothing more than these apps.
However, there is a trade-off to be made when you try to put so much power into the hands of non-experts, and one thing Apple does is idiot-proof the apps to the greatest extent that they can. They restrict what you can and cannot do in these apps, so that novices can pick up the software and accomplish something at or near professional-grade quality, without much hassle, but also without much flexibility (you do it Apple’s way or else).
Because of this trade-off, there are always complaints from people. “It doesn’t do X. I can’t do Y. It won’t let me Z.” These are typically requests from power users who want truly professional tools to do their job, and to them the iLife suite is effectively a toy: cute, but ultimately unusable. For those people, Apple offers its “Pro” suite of tools, such as Logic for audio recording, Final Cut for video, Aperture for photography.
It is certainly an interesting philosophy, and, to me, it makes a great deal of sense: Apple is providing easy-to-use tools that produce amazingly sophisticated results to the 99% of the public who have no need whatsoever for professional grade tools with all the complexity of design they exhibit and sophistication of use that they demand … but who nonetheless would like great-looking movies, sophisticated audio tracks, edited photographs, and so forth.
I think the folks at Apple are now translating to hardware the successful formula that they have proven in software: provide simple, easy-to-use, guaranteed not to fail hardware for 99% of the masses — but with the trade-off of flexibility (you do it Apple’s way or else) … this would be the iPad, running the iPhone OS and apps downloaded from the App Store. For the power users who want to tinker with their hardware and write their own software and run whatever third-party apps their hearts desire, you guys can buy a MacBook and run OSX, downloading apps from whatever website you want.
I pointed to this video before, but it is well worth a revisit. 11 out of 12 people don’t know what a browser is. And you know what? They still get the job done perfectly well. 1 out of 12 people will tinker with their computing setup, and when the thing crashes, they will be irritated with themselves or the authors of the buggy software or firmware or hardware that caused the crash. The other 11 will buy a computer, will install almost nothing, and will get mad at Apple when the thing crashes. How do you satisfy those 11? You bring them a computer that works, all the time, flawlessly, simply. You place enormous restrictions on what they can and cannot do, because ultimately that will ensure they don’t run into problem areas like advanced bugs, viruses, incompatible drivers, UI weirdness, etc. I would argue that those are things most people should never experience and should never have to know about. The other 1 out of 12? Those guys live in that arena.
Apple is finally giving us the computer for the rest of us. I, for one, applaud.
But I’ll be mad as hell if they start putting iPhone OS on my MacBook Pro and take away Perl and my C compiler. :)
