What iPad Says About Apple
John Gruber nails it:
Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated.Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
That’s where Apple is taking computing.
For those of you who hoped that the iPhone would become more open, that Apple would one day give up on the App Store approach and allow everyone to run homebrew apps willy-nilly, the iPad should signal the futility of that dream. Apple is doubling down on lockdown, and expanding their range of computers for those who aren't computer users.
This has always been the promise of the Mac, but it has always been an elusive promise, just out of reach. The Mac was and still is easier to use than competitors, with only a single button on the mouse and the menus always in a predictable place, but it was still too complex for some.
Apple knew this and tried a few different approaches, like single-application mode, but they always felt as if one was being patted on the head and treated like a child. It seemed as if the power was there, but one was being kept away for one's own good, and nobody likes being patronized.
Enter iPhone. Here's a new, yet not quite new, operating system, on a completely new type of device. Now there are reasons, or excuses if one prefers, for keeping things locked down for everyone. And now Apple can rethink everything, and take it slowly, because once the door is opened, there's no way to close it again.
Thanks to jailbreaking, as well as the simple observations of the iPod app, among others, we know that the hardware is capable of running multiple apps at once, and yet it's not allowed. Why not? Experienced computer users are frustrated, seeing the iPhone as just another computer, albeit a tiny one, and so why shouldn't they be allowed to do with it what they're used to doing on the desktop?
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