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.