I don't think he was saying that it was, only that at least the 1st time the vision was romantic and idealised by comparison. The second had no bones about ditching that to chase $$$.
First Steve and Second Steve were the same person. And he was always about the money, for as long as he'd been involved with Apple. Otherwise he wouldn't have had the Macintosh require a special case-cracking tool made only available to authorized dealers and repair shops to open.
The Steve who was most passionate about starting a revolution with cheap, accessible computers was named Wozniak.
Early in the history of computing two camps formed: the 'AI' camp that proclaimed that computers would soon be able to figure everything out on their own and 'mind amplification' camp that held that computers would become an extension to the human mind. The whole personal computing movement and thus early Apple grew out of the second camp. Alan Kay is a great representative of the second camp.
Of course, Apple soon figured out that what sells is not mind amplification tools but 'appliances' and under second Steve they became really good at producing those.
Jobs explicitly compares the computer to the bicycle -- a machine which amplifies human action and capability and turns an ungainly biped into the most efficiently locomoting land animal (or any animal) ever.
> Every step of the way programs can do less but are safer for the OS.
The important thing here is that it's a tradeoff, not an universal good. And a tradeoff that I personally don't like very much. Doing fun and interesting things keeps getting harder and harder because you have to jump through increasing amount of security hoops. For instance, reading and writing memory of other programs enabled you to do tweaks that are now almost impossible to perform.
I understand the need for change, now that a computer is expected to be connected and running untrusted third-party code by default. But we've lost something with that change, and I wish for a way to get it back.
Seriously? Explain that to the 500 person company that I'm writing an app for.
We have to pay $299/year to Apple just for the privilege of putting software on our own fucking devices. That's some bullshit right there.
The free option is worth exactly shit for such a large organization.
The $100/year is to get in the public app store where your app must obey every arbitrary rule that Apple invents. They actually have a clause that says they can kick you out of the store for any reason they want without justification.
Sure. Great. It's not an open platform though and you cannot run your own software on it if you're a business.
So that really sucks for a lot of businesses. Nothing you've said has countered that. I'm really happy that your concerns have been met. Mine and millions of others' haven't.
