Cooling it with Apple
Many who know me would say I’m a bit of an Apple Fanboy. I’m no daringfireball.net but usually there isn’t a new or revised Apple product that I don’t want to buy. This changed with the ipad which I was very disappointed in, and already said so. Though since then I can see how I might find one useful (if not price-sensible, but then what is there that Apple makes that is?), especially after reading this post about the iPad as electronic flight bag.
Since then, Apple (or rather Steve Jobs) has made a series of statements that are just outlandish, bordering on the insane. His hatred of Flash is well known but HTML5 is still 10 years away, there are going to be websites that the iDevices can’t render long after they have been placed in the dumpster. Then there’s the statement that multitasking took so long to provide because they “wanted to do it right like no one else had”. Yeah, because the Linux box on my desk does a real poor job of it.
The real reasons are obvious – no Flash because they think that websites will be so desperate to run on the iDevice that websites will change of their own accord. Multitasking took this long because Apple really didn’t want to do it but even if the rabid fanboys and girls have been crowing about it.
But these are just marketing strategies: “Don’t question our genius, we are Apple”, and I can respect that. But what I can’t respect are things like the new TOS for the SDK that forbids developers from using any tools other than Apple’s. In particular I can’t use my favourite language (which funnily enough used to be Objective-C until it pretty much died) to write apps on the iDevice. The reason: cross compiled apps are rarely any good. Such BS, Apple wants developers to choose: you are either developing for the iDevice or don’t at all. The majority of developers don’t want to maintain two or more source code trees so if you want to develop for Android, Apple wants you to get lost.
The final straw though was Jobs’ statement that there is no porn on the iDevice, and that if you want porn get a Droid Incredible. This isn’t about porn, it’s about hypocrisy. You can buy a Playboy app, and other titillating things, and any kid can surf as much (non Flash!) hardcore XXX as they can find using Safari.
Steve wants you to believe he is doing this all for you but it’s all marketing, an attempt to squeeze out all competition and have it all. And that’s ok, it’s business, but at least be honest with us. Though when Apple has the entire e-book market, they will decide what books you can read, or what applications can be developed – only the ones that Apple say can.
Anyway, what does this all mean? I’ve canceled my iPhone contract (at a $75 expense) and gone Android with the Droid Incredible. For the forseeable future, I plan to have nothing to do with Apple’s mobile strategy. I’m sure Steve is crying into a beverage somewhere 🙂