Companies like Apple are trying to leverage AWAY from General Purpose Computers – to specific machines with limited functionality that provide superior profit.

For all the hate against Microsoft – they only sell an operating system that anyone can write programs for – you can even give those programs away.

Apple is going MUCH farther and its fairly ingenious in its evil.. Now they don’t just write the operating system. But they sell the developer tools that you have to USE for specific “apple approved” functions. And then if a user wants to use these programs they have to pay Apple more money.

Thus Apple controls the whole computing experience from top to bottom and they make money every step of the way. They even control advertising on the web – as the upcoming Safari Browser will let Apple “block” ads – but will allow special apple profiting ones to exist..

But if that wasn’t enough – they control the hardware as well. No upgrading your ram – no even hooking your iPad to your computer without a non-standard apple cable. Want to output to an external display? You need a special dock etc etc.

Its just a matter of time before Apple launches a “consumer” iMac which functions like a larger more powerful iPad.

It’s been Steve vision all along.. And this is a sad thing. As a guy who likes building his own computers – one remarkable thing about a PC is that’s its a set of STANDARDS that REALLY DO WORK!

If I want top of the line DAC converters for my sound output I can add that in. If I want USB 3.0 I can add that in. If I want to buy a NEC monitor and hook it up with a cable from monoprice I can do that. I can buy cheap RAM fron Newegg and stick it in very easily..

This was the revolution of computing – computers were allowed to be used by ‘regular people” without great EXPENSE. In the jobs world Every app you buy – every add you see – every upgrade you make – it all has to benefit apple.

Apple is about maximizing your expense but its fans are so enamored with Jobs slick software and marketing they don’t see that..

Whereas original PCs were about sticking it to the man. By doing useful things on machines that you were free to use as much as you wanted – in any way you wanted whenever you wanted. It was a big FU to the world. You could use your little machine to do all kinds of neat things.

But Jobs vision of the world is YOU renting computing appliances for specific jobs and paying out the *ss for the privledge of doing so..

Apple fans think its a great leap forward but its actually a great leap back.. It’s not really “new” either. The cable companies have been doing the same thing for MANY years.

Pretty much everything a cable box and DVR do – could be done and done BETTER by a PC. But then cable companies wouldn’t profit from it. So they would rather ‘rent’ you cable box and the charge you money to make phone calls on the data pipe you already bought from the them..

Cell phone companies do the same thing of course. You pay for ‘unlimited data” but then they charge you extra for texting. They have apps that let you track your friends and family in real time and charge you 15 bucks a month for that privledge when of course they do it all the time anyway.

Apple is not set to pull these kinds of shennigans on “PITS” and dumb people are lauding them for it..

Apple is playing you for the fool and by the time you wake up it will be too late..

The first example of this was the GUI — yeah, another colonization by Apple, at least in terms of pushing the idea. My (probably highly-inaccurate) sense of the history is that GUI and object-oriented programming went together in a loose way chronologically and in a tight way in terms of dependency (GUIs requiring OOP, and OOP requiring a certain number of programmers who had been successfully converted).

So is there going to be a critical mass of developers who evangelize a “deviceless” user experience? Possibly, at least with the notion of what they can be like. Then there’s the question of infrastructure support to colonize multiple OSs with the “deviceless” experience. To wit, there are a few programming developmental kits designed to port infrastructure-specific ideas (e.g., implemented with Flash or Ruby) into something that looks and feels “native” for either iPhone/iPod-Touchy or Android (and soon iPad). I know of PhoneGap and Appcelerator (formerly Titanium). There have been some previous attempts at supposedly universal cross-platform foundations (most notoriously Java), and these may go that way, but there’s also the chance that these kits only stuff in enough of the foundation to make the apps work without layering on an entire OS (the way that a Java program requires loading of all of a Java client).

Will this pan out? I don’t know. But it’s possible that we’re witnessing the beginnings of something of the magnitude of the introduction of the GUI: clunky, start-and-stop in some ways, but one-way.

So hard to balance the need for an aesthetic experience with the need for openness. I’m still thinking about that one. We could say that Apple could be both open and aesthetic; but I suspect Jobs would disagree strongly.

My point is, I think this is a business position more than an objective statement of possibility. A 2010 Mac desktop, for example, has an open source base OS, wifi, bluetooth, USB and Firewire, which together make it a fair bit more open than their mobile stuff.

In my own recent buying choices, I’ve clearly put a greater premium on openness. But this is in part because I think it’s a bit too cliche to accept there is a vast gulf in user experience between Apple products and everything else. I think there are places where the iPhone UI wins, for example, but I also am quite happy with my Android (Nexus One) UI as well.

What I think is interesting and worth debating–and as you probably can guess, I’m very torn about this–is the value one places on creativity at different levels in the computer stack. Apple’s philosophy since 1979 is that ideally all the tinkering should be at the top of the stack, whereas Bruce and many others believe that we should be free to tinker at all levels. I’m an advocate for open source/access and a computer tinkerer, and so I’m strongly inclined toward the latter as well. But (again, like many others) I can understand Jobs’s feeling that to enable the “liberal arts” (note his use of that last week) you have to make the computer disappear. Just look at what computer novices have done with the Brushes app on an iPhone (a program that will be even more compelling on an iPad). We may wish that in the near future there will be an open source Brushes app on a ChromePad; but I’m willing to bet it will be clunkier and that seemingly minor aesthetic differences (to non-artists) will reduce the non-computer-savvy artist’s potential of creativity (not to mention the X-factor of inspiration from holding an aesthetically pleasing device).

So hard to balance the need for an aesthetic experience with the need for openness. I’m still thinking about that one. We could say that Apple could be both open and aesthetic; but I suspect Jobs would disagree strongly.