BlackBerry PlayBook: The big sibling (as opposed to little)

So the BlackBerry tablet device — the PlayBook — bas been announced, here:

RIM introduces PlayBook — the BlackBerry tablet

(Engadget)

and rebutted here:

The BlackBerry PlayBook Doesn’t Exist

(Justice Gödel Condor)

And perhaps the second most interesting thing about the announcement is the music playing behind the ad:

Cut Copy — “Where I’m Going”

To me, the most interesting thing about it is the pairing. Well, after the question of whether or not it exists, of course. Anyway, I find this design philosophy really intriguing, because the design philosophy of an artifact often finds its way into many or most of the artifact’s details. And here, the pairing is arguably the most striking element of RIM’s design philosophy for the device, so it has the potential to lead the device in a lot of interesting directions.

Let’s compare this thing to the iPad: the PlayBook is the phone’s big sibling, whereas the iPad is the desktop’s little sibling.

It’s all about the pairing, in my opinion. The iPad is (currently) useless without an OSX-based machine to pair it to, at least at initialization. The big sibling to which you attach it provides backups and, at least initially, all of the authentication and personal information needed. This may change in the near future (evidently the device will soon get the ability to print documents, for example—woo!). But currently, it is a slave device. A really cool, easy-to-use, remarkably powerful slave device, but a slave nonetheless.

The PlayBook is paired to the phone: it is a big sibling. If RIM allows this philosophy to pervade their design decisions, then the device has serious potential to be powerful in ways that the iPad (currently) is not. The iPad is currently not designed to be a standalone computer, and I believe much of that is due to its little-sibling status. The PlayBook could potentially attract some market attention away from the iPad if the big-sibling status becomes their rallying point … make this device the functional equivalent of a laptop (in terms of capabilities), and you’ll make a lot of people very happy.

I have an iPad. I love using it, and my kids fight each other to use it. However, I have not yet purchased an iPad for my parents, because it is not the equivalent of a standalone laptop/desktop yet … you can’t print from it, you can’t Skype on it, you can’t backup its contents without tethering it to a host computer, etc. It will be interesting to see how many of these issues RIM addresses with the gen1 version … when/if it comes out.

Google can [and will] remove Android apps from your phone

Check this out, from “Exercising Our Remote Application Removal Feature” on android-developers.blogspot.com:

Every now and then, we remove applications from Android Market due to violations of our Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement or Content Policy. In cases where users may have installed a malicious application that poses a threat, we’ve also developed technologies and processes to remotely remove an installed application from devices. If an application is removed in this way, users will receive a notification on their phone.

… and this particular blog entry let the world know that they had just exercised that feature on every Android phone out there hosting a particular app. Let’s put this in perspective: Apple removes apps from the App Store (and is branded “evil” for doing so); Google removes apps from their version of an App Store (the Android Market), and also removes apps directly off of your personal phone.

The fact that they have done this is far less disturbing than the fact that they put in place the hooks to do it in the first place. They have a back door in every single Android phone out there … a back door that allows them to control your phone. They say that the reason is for your security: 

The remote application removal feature is one of many security controls Android possesses to help protect users from malicious applications. 

However, history shows that malicious things are often done in the name of increased security. Also, the “one of many” quote above is kinda ominous to me.

Anybody know if Apple has a similar feature in the iPhone?

More reasons to love Flash

Tputh.com pointed to the following site, which is now down:

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attack

You, can, of course, get Google’s cached version here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Z4lufF2NUowJ:www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attack/+http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/a-new-type-of-phishing-attack/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

Aza Raskin, Creative Lead of Firefox, describes a trojan horse attack whereby the scripts on an ostensibly innocuous site wait to see when you have started looking elsewhere (navigate to other tabs, other open windows, etc.), and when this is detected, the content on the site is replaced with a lookalike of a login window for gmail, facebook, online banking, whatever it detects that you use and currently have open. When you “log in” to the service, the site just forwards you to the real site, where you are still logged in as before, so it will appear that you have successfully re-logged in. But now the phishing site has your credentials, and you are none the wiser.

Here’s the money quote:

Every time you include a third-party script on your page, or a Flash widget, you leave yourself wide open for an evil doer to use your website as a staging ground for this kind of attack. If you are the evil doer, you can have this behavior only occur once in a while, and only if the user uses a targeted service. In other words, it could be hard to detect.

Yeah, the point is that your site doesn’t have to be the bad site … if you have a Flash script, say, from an advertiser that you don’t know well, that script could be the one to take over the session. Woo hoo! I agree with his conclusion:

… it’s time for the browser to take a more active role in being your smart user agent; one that knows who you are and keeps your identity, information, and credentials safe.

Or, you know, just disable Flash. Or buy an iPad.

Chickfight!

I just read some really awesome perspective on the tiff between Apple and Adobe. To begin, lest we forget that the iPhone was the first platform to truly open the world of mobile-app development, Kontra reminds us of whence we came:

Many of the App Store developers got into creating products for mobile devices precisely because for the very first time in history the iPhone allowed them to bypass the limits, cost and sheer operational lunacy imposed by telecom carriers. In less than a couple of years, Apple created an online distribution monster of 185,000 apps and 3.5 billion downloads. The fact that no other app store clone has been able to even approach that ought to tell developers something about the magnitude of the efficacy of the App Store. The grass isn’t greener elsewhere.

Inner Daemon reminds us that Adobe has been rooting for Apple to fail for years (my own personal story of woe and longing is the loss of FrameMaker):

In 1996 when Apple was seemingly on the ropes, Adobe made a crucial business decision and one that is coming back to bite them in the ass. They declared that their primary development platform would be Windows; subsequently, every new application or major revision of a product was introduced for Windows first and followed months later, sometimes never at all, by a Mac version.
After Steve Jobs took over and he was charting out a new course with OS X, Apple reached out many times to Abode to introduce a native version of their suite for the new OS. Adobe never committed – standing by its prediction that OS X would never gain momentum or share and it would ride the Windows ascendancy. Adobe thought that it had the dominant hand and displayed its arrogance in public.
[Now], Apple is clicking on all cylinders – it has not only reinforced its dominance in the creative graphics segment but also the web development platform, the mobile development platform and content delivery. Adobe’s not feeling too good about their dominance or that primary development platform choice any more. Are they?
Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. [And yet, s]omehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.

Louis Gerbarg gives a whole lot of insight into Apple’s technical concerns:

What Apple does care about is their ability to control their own development cycles. iPhoneOS runs on extremely tight schedules, with a very high degree of secrecy, and at a pace completely controlled by Apple. I know it is popular to claim that maintaining binary compatibility is easy; that is the argument du jour made by people claiming Apple should just support developers using private APIs. Well, they are just wrong. Ask anyone who has been involved with a couple of releases of Mac OS or Windows about the amount of effort involved in keeping old apps working, especially those using private APIs. There is a reason why the majority of current and former framework engineers who comment on the issue come out really strongly against any use of private APIs.
This isn’t some perceived risk, I can think of incidents where Apple reverted OS changes, dumped new APIs, or was forced to committing massive engineering resources to something it did not want to do because a Must Not Break™ app vendor told them to. Apple does not want to give anyone that sort of influence over them. So ultimately, preventing Flash on the platform is about control, but is not control over the user experience of the Flash applications, or even the languages used. It is about the runtimes they bring on to the system, and Apple’s control over future releases of iPhone OS.

… and Adobe’s use of its developer base to try to push Apple around:

Personally, in this whole thing the most distasteful part is that Adobe used its userbase and their livelihood as a bargaining chip. These kinds of high stakes negotiations have happened in the past many times. They are much more common than people think, and until the last few years Apple was more likely to be on the weaker side of the negotiation. The story of MacBasic is a classic example, but I can think of other (not publicly disclosed) incidents involving Adobe and Macromedia (which was acquired by Adobe, and is where the Flash team comes from) applying extreme pressure to Apple. This is the only case where I feel an active user community was publicly jerked around like this in order for one side to try to gain leverage over the other. That is saying a lot, because I am not pleased with Apple’s actions either, but Adobe put Apple in a position where either Adobe got its way or Apple screwed developers.

Lastly, Kontra wraps it all up nicely:

Over the years, it must have been embarrassing for Steve Jobs to swallow his contempt every time he had to invite an executive from Microsoft or Adobe to the stage at a keynote event to explain why their Mac product was behind schedule and inferior to their Windows version.
However, 2010 is not like 1994. Apple has money, mindshare and the hottest platform to no longer having to beg. Today, Apple is more concerned about having to re-live its recent history — getting jerked around by Microsoft or held hostage by Adobe — than what it thinks would be manageable damage by a few developers that may leave its platform. Some may regard that as being arrogant. For Apple it’s the price of being in charge of its own destiny. To capitulate at the height of its newly found vigor would be suicidal. Suicidal Apple is no longer.

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. :)

On walled gardens and information appliances

An old friend of mine sent me a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “All your apps are belong to Apple” writeup that recently surfaced, and he asked what I thought. In the article they list a number of “troubling” (EFF’s term) points found in the iPhone developer license, among them:

  • A ban on public statements about the license
  • Apps can only be sold through the App Store
  • A ban on reverse-engineering Apple’s technology
  • A ban on tinkering with Apple’s technology (e.g. jailbreaking) 
  • The right for Apple to kill your app at any time
  • A restitution limit of $50

Yeah, kinda seems “draconian” (the term used by The Huffington Post to describe the license) when listed like that. It is easy to look at this and declare Apple a bunch of control freaks who have thoroughly overstepped bounds of reason, which is how the media has responded.

However, details aside (e.g. the restitution limit is absurd), I can’t think of another, significantly better, way to solve the problem. The problem, as I see it, is a way to create an information appliance, a computing appliance. The iPhone, and now the iPad, represent a new class of device. This is the first time that the tech industry has even approached Jef Raskin’s vision of an appliance, as opposed to what we all know and love as a “computer” today. The theoretical device differs dramatically from existing computers in several important ways:

  1. It must be extremely reliable.
  2. It must be extremely reliable.
  3. It must be extremely reliable.

And it has to be simple and intuitive to use. But, focusing on the reliability aspect, the question immediately begs answering: how do you make a computing platform that is reliable? You only have a handful of possibilities:

  1. You code everything yourself. Not viable, because all previous examples demonstrate the customer wants lots of third-party application support.
  2. You open the platform completely. No current platform with widespread developer support is both open and highly reliable. Unix systems probably come closest, but they are enthusiast devices, not targeting (or appropriate for) the computer novice, the demographic targeted by an information appliance. Even the Palm system, which had thousands of third-party apps for their mobile devices, was problematic: students of mine had Palm devices, and they tell me many of the apps brought their handsets crashing down. Not viable.
  3. You open the platform to third-party developers, but you wall the garden. This is what Apple is doing. It seems to work—the iPhone and iTouch have third-party apps, the platforms are nonetheless reliable, everybody is happy.

If there is another model available, I don’t see it … I would love to hear ideas, but at the moment I think this approach is the only way to ensure reliability of the platform. You can argue about some of the iPhone SDK license details, because I agree they’re a tad one-sided. Yeah, a tad or so. But Apple went into relatively uncharted territory here, and so they are bound to start off over-cautious, over-anxious, and over-protective. 

Ultimately, I think the appropriate measure is the strength of the platform. Namely, what is the user experience like? and are developers making money? Those two questions are really all that matters, because as soon as either fails the test, the whole platform dies.

Let’s go beyond Print++

I just read “Books in the age of the iPad” by Craig Mod. It is a brief manifesto on how to think about targeting print as a medium as everything goes digital. I was struck by the following really provocative quote:

In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not.

Brilliant writing, love the punch. Anyway, this dovetails with my call to budding entrepreneurs at the University of Maryland the other day — the iPad offers (at least) two paths for innovators:

  • application development
  • content development

The first wave of content created for the iPad is likely to imitate the two-page spreads of magazines, interspersed with video, audio, links to stories as sidebars, etc. The various mockups done for Sports Illustrated, WIRED, and (my favorite) the concept by Bonnier all follow this trend. It’s basically just print++ … i.e., a bigger better print experience, or print taken to the next level.

But what Craig Mod is pointing out is that this thinking is short-sighted. He doesn’t offer thoughts on what other forms are possible, but that doesn’t take away from his message, which is effectively hey, all of you story-tellers out there, here’s an opportunity to take story-telling somewhere it’s never been before.

The machinima wave I think is a precursor to what will happen. A CPU-based story-telling platform can offer much that is completely — completely — unavailable in any other medium including print, audio, video/movies, and even live multimedia. In particular, it offers a rich/multimedia, immersive, interactive (gesture-based on tablets), animated environment — the interactive part being the key. Machinima is what happens when you lower the barrier to entry for animated story telling … but it is still one-way content, i.e. the flow is from creator to consumer. Imagine what can happen when you put the consumer into the creative loop.

Already, we see that many first-person video games have effectively become stories, interactive movies. In addition, a significant number of game players are using the game medium for either communication (hanging out with friends in the virtual on-line space) or for simple exploration (the Myst titles and their offshoots, for example … people often just walked through the worlds without solving the puzzles). The implication is that not everyone wants a challenge; many just want the immersive environment. It is not a huge leap to see a market for what is effectively a game but which contains no game, just the story.

So, with that in mind, sharpen your pencils and OpenGL skills. There are stories to be told.

Apple vs. Goog\b\b\b\b HTC

Earlier today I read the Engadget article on Apple suing HTC, the handset manufacturer making Google’s Nexus One. I had no idea what an enormous crapstorm this thing would open up. Here’s just one place well worth checking out: a student at Maryland pointed me to a really well thought-out, intelligent discussion going on at Hacker News.

My thoughts …

Swiping to unlock and other similar patented items are all “obvious” design decisions. All great design is obvious because great design produces things that are appropriate. Moreover, because great design is so obvious, it must be easy to design great things; the world must be full of great designs.

Right?

Um, no. The truth is that great design is not easy, and it stands out so prominently because the world is not full of great designs. Things like swiping to unlock are “obvious” only in retrospect. All great design is obvious — in retrospect — because great design produces things that are appropriate. But it is hard to do (Paul Graham, instigator of the HN discussion linked above, has several essays on precisely this topic). Moreover, because it is hard to do, great designers are rewarded with some degree of protection for making the details of their innovations public (thus the legal terminology that patents “teach” a particular topic). I don’t see why we should expect great designers to give up control of their ideas, willingly or otherwise, simply because those ideas are particularly good. Much of the logic in the public backlash to Apple’s suit amounts to “the iPhone had such a marvelously simple UI that everyone copied it, and because it became pervasive (by virtue of the copying), we want it to remain pervasive (because, you know, then we’d have to buy an iPhone if we wanted that UI), via Apple giving up the right to protect their IP.”

I just don’t buy that. Just because something is good doesn’t mean it belongs to the public domain.

People are asking “why now? why not earlier?” According to Engadget, Gizmodo & other news sites, the brief is some 700 pages long. I’m sure Apple started working on this the day the Nexus One details started surfacing and it became clear it was effectively an iPhone clone. 700 pages of legalese takes a long time to pull together.

People are also asking “why aren’t they suing Google?” They can’t sue Google (Lord knows they want to: remember that Schmidt sat in Apple’s huddles for years, listening to the plays, learning the playbook by heart, soaking up all insider info he could) because Google is intentionally disabling contested technology in Android — they evidently know quite well what patent infringement means and are running the other way. Google is instead relying upon their handset manufacturer/s to enable the contested technology before shipping the product and thus take the bullet on Google’s behalf. I wonder why nobody is criticizing Google for using HTC as a “human” shield?

At any rate, the debate is clearly going to take on a life of its own.

Dude, just pay for it already

I just read a post called “Twitter timelines stopped updating hours ago. Why no word from the mothership?” by Martin Bryant at theNextWeb.com … here’s the meat of it:

This is a familiar problem – Twitter has these glitches from time-to-time – but after six hours you’d have thought Twitter might have noticed and updated their Status Blog with a reassuring update that they were aware of the problem and were working on a solution. Alas no, they’re silent.
As Twitter becomes a utility for increasing numbers of people, it really can’t afford to be complacent with service faults. The fault may have emerged in the middle of a weekend night at Twitter HQ in California but do they not have 24-hour service engineers? If not, why not?

So you have a service — a valuable service, given that it has become a “utility” for many — and it’s free, and you’re clearly ticked off that it’s been unavailable for part of the day. Actually, this was posted on Feb 28th, so that was Sunday. This guy is indignant about a free service going down over the weekend.

Wow. Words escape me.

Hey, Twitter, I find your service valuable enough to pay for it, and I think I speak for most of the twitterverse on that topic. People have pointed this out before: don’t put anything important in the cloud unless you’re paying for the service. With free services, you get what you pay for, and expecting anything more than that is foolish. Getting more than nothing for a free service (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.) is pure gravy, and we should not lose sight of that.

More importantly, I think these free services, rather than going to advertising and all-out sales for sustainability (like Facebook is now doing), might want to consider other avenues. I maintain that the reason iTunes succeeded was because the price-convenience ratio was right, meaning that, even though people had become accustomed to downloading free music on the net, iTunes put a pay-for-music model out there that was more convenient than pirating and at a low enough cost that people chose it over pirating. If Apple had priced each track at $2.99 would they have done as well? I think not. This just goes back to an argument people were making a decade ago: that as soon as the cost of downloading something becomes less than the cost of storing it, piracy will disappear. If you can rent a movie for about the cost of a blank DVD, which do you think people will choose? (likely answer: the more convenient one)

Right now, these free services are wonderful: they are convenient and powerful. Supporting the business models with advertising, direct marketing, and shopping is one clear avenue, but when you have exposed your APIs, then you have paved an advertising-free path to your content (which, personally, I will always take, given the option). So instead of cluttering up your content with ads, why not take the iTunes approach and set a price point that is (a) high enough to keep the business alive, including 24-hour engineering support :)  and (b) low enough that deciding whether to opt in is a no-brainer for your existing client base.

Actually, now that I think about it, Apple’s App Store is already set up for precisely this arrangement, supporting free apps that charge subscription fees for their content (I’m looking at you, iPad). If that’s the case, it will be interesting to see how quickly the net wakes up to the idea that we should be paying, at least a little, for the content we digest.

UPDATE (2 Mar 2010): I just read “Why DRM Doesn’t Work, Or: How to Download an Audio Book From the Cleveland Public Library” by The Brads. Funny cartoon that underscores the sentiment.

The iPad and its appeal to humanity

The other day I pointed to this video as describing the computer literacy of the vast majority of potential consumers out there. It’s a Google employee asking random people on the street in Times Square “what’s a browser?” Result: fewer than 1 in 12 people understand the technology they use.

My point: they don’t have to. They shouldn’t have to.

I just read “60 million Americans don’t use the interwebs” by Rik Myslewski at The Register. It is an underscoring of the Google video. Some quotes:

Of the roughly 60 million adult Americans who don’t use the internet at all, 47 per cent cited cost and complexity and 45 per cent agreed with the survey statement that “I am worried about all the bad things that can happen if I use the Internet.”
Of all respondents who told the FCC that they don’t have broadband - both dial-up and non-internet users - only 4 per cent said that the reason was lack of availability. More important to them was “too much pornography and offensive material” (65 per cent) and their belief that it’s “too easy for my personal information to be stolen online” (57 per cent).”
The survey is part of the run-up to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, which will be delivered to Congress on March 17. According to the FCC’s statement, this plan “details a strategy for connecting the country to affordable, world-class broadband.”

I think Apple is the only group that sees the problem correctly. Or, at least, the only group that sees the problem and is visibly doing something about it. The problem is not broadband but the device and interface that you use to connect to it.

This article by Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo (written before the iPad’s launch) did an amazingly prescient job of relating the work of Jef Raskin (who evangelized the concept of the “information appliance” in the 1980s) to the iPhone and the iPad. The iPhone is the first true information appliance: a computer so easy to use that anyone just “gets it” and can start using it immediately without having to be tutored. The only drawback is the screen size — not really large enough to take over the responsibilities of your “normal” computer.

This is where the iPad comes in: it takes the iPhone’s “so simple anybody can use it” concept and gives it more screen acreage to work with. The iPad, even though it is being described right now as an appendage to your desktop or laptop, will ultimately replace both the desktop and the laptop. Why? Because the vast majority of people are not computer geeks; they don’t need a confusing box of complex UI conventions and subtle error scenarios (e.g. the active window not being the one at the top of the pile). They don’t have broadband at home because it is non-trivial to set up and intimidating to use. Let’s not even talk about setting up wireless at home.

Why? Why should it take an electrical or computer engineer to set up networking at home? Why should you need to be a seasoned expert in various “productivity” software packages just to get simple tasks done quickly? My neighbors frequently turn to their children for help after wasting hours on a spreadsheet or word-processing document (and their children solve the issue in seconds). Why? Why are computers so difficult to use for the vast majority? Why have we (and I include myself in this) not designed computers specifically to be easy to use?

Answer: because nobody has forced us to.

I think people are waking up to what this is about. Apple is simplifying the interface in an appeal to humanity. In both senses of the word.

Just look at the run-down of issues they’ve tackled:

  1. It’s always connected to the intertubes, without you having to do anything.
  2. It’s got a simple, intuitive interface.
  3. It’s got all the apps most people use on a daily basis.
  4. It’s inexpensive.
  5. It explicitly avoids software and scenarios that are potential security threats.
  6. Its software just works.

These are the issues that people — users — care about. They could care less about openness of platforms or whether a particular piece of software is supported — they just want to do a small handful of simple things without having to deal with a computer on the computer’s terms. They want an appliance.

And Apple is giving them one.