Steve Jobs hates amateurs

While Charlie Stross has posted his trenchant observations on why Steve Jobs hates flash, I have another idea on why Steve Jobs isn't opposed to much of what the iPad represents.

Jobs is famously design-oriented. One story goes that he even chose the bathroom tiles at One Infinite Loop. He has discussed book design and industrial design at his popular keynote addresses, and his tyrannical approach to the limiting capabilities of the iPad and iPhone in order to make them "perfect" is almost legendary.

I read an article the other day about a man who brought home his shiny new iPad to his family, and discovered that within a month he was having to buy a second one: everyone in his family of four had either a desktop or a laptop, but they all wanted to use the iPad. It was that seductive. And after a month, the other machines were going unused.

Omaha has an iPad and I've used it. It's nice, but it hasn't discouraged me from using my laptop. In fact, I don't quite see the point of having it. I can't open it; I can't hack it. Violet Blue cutely suggests that if you can't put porn on it you don't own it. My biggest frustration with it is just that: I can't make it mine. Everything digital thing I own-- the camera, the Razr, my Palms, the (3rd generation) iPod, every laptop, even my tiny Olympus digital voice recorder-- I can access down to the root bits and bytes.

One of the most important observations Palm ever had regarding its devices is that they are essentially output devices: they're meant to be read. You put very little data into them, and you use the repeating features far more often than you do the ad-hoc ones. Palm realized that putting data into the thing had to be possible; getting data out of the thing had to be immediate and satisfying.

As I read that article about the poor father doomed to buying his family iPads all around, I thought more about the neglected devices left gathering dust around his house. And the one thing they all have in common is that access to putting stuff into them was immediate and omnipresent; creation is on an equal footing with consumption.

That's not true of the current generation of tablets. And I don't think Steve Jobs cares; Stross is probably right that Jobs is trying to bootstrap a cloud-based economy with Apple in the center, but he's doing so in a way that seduces the amateur creatives in the audience to give up the tools with which amateur create. There are lots of chiptek musicians who first decided to try something after stumbling across the MIDI driver on their computer-- but soon there will be no chance of that happening. There are lots of good illustrators on Deviant Art who started out with a pirated copy of Photoshop-- but soon there will be no chance of that happening. There are thousands of amateur novelists out there hacking away at Word or Oowriter-- but if all you own is an iPad, writing long-form fiction is an exercise in masochism.

And for a lot of kids, the next computer-- the only computer-- they'll own will be an iPad. A read-only device. A device for culture consumers, not culture creators.

I might own a Wepad someday, but only if I can own it. The next music player I buy will be an Archos. I don't know what I'm going to do for a phone.

The Maine Republican Party goes Wild!

Attention, Maine Republican Party:

If you're fighting to protect the status quo of regulatory capture enabling limited, collusive insurance companies to secure the market against competition, you are not capitalists.

If you don't care about the fact that over a thousand otherwise productive American citizens in your state alone die every year due to a lack of health care, you are not patriots.

If you don't believe in helping the sick and weak, the least among us, you are not Christians.

What the Hell are you, then?

Why Typography Matters

This morning on the commute into work, I passed by a truck with the logo "Applied Organics" plastered across the side. The typeface chosen was soft, rounded, almost sensual-- obviously intended to contrast with the hard-edged look of some imagined "Applied Industrial," or whatever. It turns out they're a landscaping company.

But it was a similar typeface to that used by Babeland and Tiny Nibbles and a host of other women-run sex sites, and my first reading was "Applied Orgasms," and I thought, "Hey, I wanna work for those people!"

P.S. While researching this post, I discovered Applied Organics, Inc., makers of Firefly, "The World's Best All-Organic Personal Lubricant!" Giggity.

Worst Product Placement In History

It's only 14 seconds long, a snipped from the TV show CSI:

"I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic; see if I can track an IP address."

Man, I hope Microsoft gets their money's worth out of that gut-twistingly bad piece of dialogue. For my money, maybe looking at the fucking router table might make you a more effective moron. Something like:

# ip route show

You know, actually doing your job and catching the killer rather than wasting your time prettying it up with that child's plaything.

[Hat tip: Omaha]