Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

This (or this among many others) is one of the best written piece about Apple hypocrisy. Excerpts below:

Carbon

In his letter, Jobs derided Adobe for not adopting new technologies quick enough, pointing specifically towards how long it has taken Adobe to leave Carbon behind. It wasn't until the recently released Creative Suite version 5.0 that Adobe switched its applications over to Cocoa. Considering how old Cocoa is, it's indeed about time.

But then, why did it take Apple so many years to transition the prime Mac OS X application, the Finder, to Cocoa? The Cocoa variant of the Finder shipped with Snow Leopard, which was released August 28, 2009. To make matters worse - iTunes still hasn't been re-written in Cocoa, and is still shipping in all its 32bit Carbon goodness.

You could argue that surely, iTunes has no benefit from switching to Carbon and 64bit, and I'll grant you that one. However, Apple has one massive application that is still fully Carbon and 32bit, an application that is very similar in scope to Adobe's product offerings: Final Cut Pro is still written in Carbon, and is still 32bit. In other words, it's okay for Apple to neglect Cocoa for Final Cut Pro, but it's not okay for Adobe to take their time.

I think the prime reason it is taking/has taken both Adobe and Apple so long to transition these massively complex applications over to Cocoa is quite a simple one: it's really hard. These aren't Chess or TextEdit we're talking about, people - we're looking at what is probably a massive amount of complicated code.

It's not just Adobe that has taken its sweet time to transition to Cocoa. Microsoft Office:Mac 2008 is also written in Carbon, and heck, even Apple itself is still in the middle of transitioning to Cocoa.

H264


We've talked about this on OSNews in quite some detail already. H264 is no better than Flash. This video codec is proprietary and patented up the wazzoo, and therefore, wholly incompatible with the very concept of an open standard. To make matters much, much worse, the licensing body that oversees H264, the MPEG-LA, has stated in no uncertain terms that they will not hesitate to sue ordinary users for using the video codec.

Why, then, is Apple, in a letter full of talk of openness and standards, promoting this closed codec, a codec that will once again shackle the web to a proprietary technology, just as we're busy breaking free from Flash? The answer is easy: follow the money.

Apple is part of the MPEG-LA, as is Microsoft. This means that the more people license H264, the more money Apple and Microsoft get, since their patents are in the patent pool. Steve Jobs might go all starry-eyed and gush about how much Apple believes in open standards and the open web, but just as with any other company - Adobe, Microsoft - this support ends where Apple's wallet begins.

That is the sole reason why they're promoting H264, disguising it as a web standard. As you can see, I can get very worked up over this. At least when Microsoft is talking about standards, everybody knows it's out of self-interest; we geeks know Microsoft, and none of us will fall for that trap any longer. This, however, is not yet the case with Apple - people still have this 1984-esque perception of Apple being the rebel, and this leads to people accepting H264 without question.

This is dangerous, and will cripple the web once again. And yes, I will hammer on this subject on OSNews for as long as it takes. I have no problems whatsoever with proprietary software or technologies (heck, my media centres both run Windows 7, and I love my iPhone), but when it comes to the web, I am nearly militant about keeping it open. I still remember the days when not having Flash was a major problem on many alternative operating systems, and just as we are starting to break free from it, Apple and Microsoft come in, pull the wool over everybody's eyes, and shackle the web to yet another proprietary technology.

I don't want to boot up Haiku R1 only to not be able to watch video content on the web. It brings back too many unpleasant memories of yore.

iTunes


This one is strongly related to the Carbon aspect. Jobs' letter talks about how it's bad for a platform if developers use cross-platform technologies, and more specifically, that Adobe has been slow in adopting new technologies in Mac OS X, with Carbon of course being the prime example.

And yet, without any sense of shame, Apple ships iTunes for Windows. iTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows software you can possibly think of. It does not integrate with Windows in any way, does not use any of the advanced technologies present since Windows Vista (refined in Windows 7), it's incredibly slow, it crashes a lot, it still hasn't been ported to 64bit (despite consumer 64bit versions of Windows existing since 2005) and in general, sucks harder than a... No, I'm not going to finish that analogy.

Oh, and of course, it installs a whole boatload of services that run in the background without actually asking you for permission. Install iTunes on Windows, and watch WinPatrol spaz out.

Remind you of anything? Yes, iTunes (and all other Windows software Apple ships) is the Flash of the Windows platform (other than, uh, Flash itself, obviously). The hypocrisy is so thick here you could cut it with a knife. What makes it worse is the situation isn't getting any better - quite the opposite. Every new version of iTunes for Windows only seems to make it worse instead of better.

I have an iPhone and I love it. However, I will not install iTunes for Windows. I installed it to first set up my iPhone and transfer my CD collection, and then removed it as quickly as I could. I'll install it again on a Windows machine once iPhone OS 4.0 is released. Point releases be damned.

This actually brings up the last point I wanted to make, yet another point to illustrate the hypocrisy. My main desktop, which I use for everything, has always had Linux installed alongside Windows, but somewhere late last year I realised I didn't really use Windows any longer, so I decided to just remove it altogether.

This, of course, has cut me off from iTunes (yay!), while also cutting me off from access to my iPhone (boo!). It would be incredibly trivial for Apple to allow people to manage their iPhone's and iPod's contents manually through the file manager, but illustrating its love for double standards, Apple refuses to. They want to tie you to iTunes, world's worst piece of Windows software.

iAd Unlevels The Playing Field

Apple’s New Developer Agreement Unlevels the iAd Playing Field

Author summarizes his concerns as follows

Barring app developers from collecting usage information will hurt clearly app developers by limiting their ability to improve their apps. As for competing ad networks, they appear to be hobbled by Apple’s new policy, reducing choice for developers who want to include ads on iPhone OS devices.

It would be very un-Apple-like for the company to back down and alter this agreement. But if it really bars ad networks that compete with Apple iAd from gathering analytics, as appears to be the case, Apple iAd network will be able to offer far more valuable ads than any competing network will be able to — a powerful selling point.

Welcome to the velvet prison

Excerpts from Apple Wants To Own You:

Unless you're a captive of Steve Jobs' reality-distortion field, it's easy to see that Apple's rules are more about blunting competitors and creating a prudish atmosphere guaranteed to offend nobody than they are about throttling viruses and improving the user experience. I don't think Apple should be enjoined from imposing its dictatorial edicts about what can and can't run on iPhones, as long as consumers know the score going in. 

Apple is beyond proprietary

Here is what Scott McNealy had to say about Apple. From http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/04/15/scott-mcnealy-can-still-dish/?section=magazines_fortune

Apple (AAPL) and Steve Jobs: “Apple is beyond proprietary, and the consumer has no idea that they are checking into the roach motel. Jobs has been brilliant, and he also understands the power of the secret better than anyone I have ever seen.”

No Sh!t Allowed in the App Store? Oh Please!

Excerpts from http://designbygravity.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/no-sht-allowed-in-the-app-store-oh-please/

Apple Exercises Relentless Control of the App Store Because It Wants To.
They don’t do it for any reason that benefits the customer. They do it solely for themselves.
Apple decided they could make more money with this level of control. Period.
Apple just wants to make money. Ascribing any other motivation is just stupid.

I have made the above point many times in my discussions with people. It is amazing to see the Apple users (or even gadget sites) go far and beyond to convice themselves that all the restrictions or changes are for their good even in the absence of reason for the change from Apple. Are Apple users just sheeples?

No Freedom to Tinker

Apple builds products that look and feel good. But to me it is boring. What does a techie or a geek tinkers with in their Apple ONLY World? I suspect there isn't much. Are there really computer geeks among Apple users? BTW, there is a huge difference between a gadget lover and a techie/hardware geek. The former is someone who buys shiny new stuff and appreciates its utility but doesn't understand much of its internals. Also, gadgets have low barrier for entry as it doesn't take much effort to configure or make it work in the world of plug and play. I just had a recent encounter with one today where he was surprised to learn from me that using wi-fi capability in his mobile does not require active cellular data plan. This user has been using his Smartphone for quite sometime :-)

I love the PC platform for it allows me to tear it down and rebuild with whatever configuraion I want. I spend countless hours trying to understand the difference between different CPU sockets or the difference between SIMM or DIMM so I can make the right choice during upgrade or building a PC. Sure it has a tax but it is something you choose to go with rather than being locked down to a hardware with not much to tinker with. For anyone critizing me, think of what can you tinker with on an iMac? Compare it to a PC you buy from any vendor. You don't like the mother board or the hard drive, no problem. Just get one from NewEgg that is the latest and greatest and you are done. There is no need to shell out thousand dollars or more just to upgrade. On a lighter note, this comparison touches a bit on my point.

Apple wants their users (or expects their users) to be dumb and so it hides all the complexity assuming the user is better off not knowing it. It may work very well for the current generation of adults who did not grow up with computers from early age. But it is not true for next/future generations where kids are exposed to computers at a very young age and are very comfortable with them.

My ramblings aside, the recent news about the removal of Scratch app from App Store is very disappointing. It is a simple and elegant app that allows you to do a bit of creative programming and is the result of draconian app store rules. As Ed Felten put it on his recent blog,

If you're not a techie, this stuff may seem like inside baseball to you. But it does affect what you can do and see. You may not know all of the details of why the app store starts looking more and more like Disneyland, but you'll notice that it's happening.

Finally, I want to address the common objection that most people don't care about limits on programming, because they don't know how to program. To me, this is like saying that you don't care about restaurant closings because nobody in your house knows how to cook. If you can't cook for yourself, you should care more about restaurant quality. If all of the good restaurants close, good cooks will just make their own good meals -- but you'll be out of luck.

Apple now restricts what language you can write your apps on

This is insane and Steve Jobs has just gone mad. The furor is over a change in developer agreement that states the following:

“3.3.1 … Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

As a developer/programmer for nearly 2 decades, what is beyond me is why anyone would want to put a restriction like that when it does not make much sense. I sort of understood (but disagreed) when Apple prohibited interpretted code in iPhone OS. But not the current restriction. No matter what language or tools you use, as long as it runs native instructions and does not use banned/private APIs, it should be fine. But that is not the case. Apple is explicitly prohibiting tools that developers can use to improve productivity, efficiency & help ship their tools across multiple platforms.

Does Apple expect that app developers be wedded to iPhone OS and be at the mercy of Steve'O? What next? Perhaps Apple could next put a restriction that requires that the App can only be published to iPhone app store and not other platforms?

Web is full of commentaries on this issue. For some more perspective on this issue, below links should help
New iPhone Developer Agreement Bans the Use of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone Compiler
Apple Dev Program takes stand on nature of consciousness
What Apple Just Did
Steve Jobs just ruined the iPhone for Clojure
Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad


For a bit of legal perspective on the issue, see Is the iPhone a banana?

UPDATE: Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1