Wozniak Calls For Open Apple

aesoteric writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has voiced a renewed desire to see the company open its architecture to the masses, allowing savvy users to expand and add to their products at will. However, Wozniak qualified his desire for a more open Apple by arguing that openness should not impinge on the quality of the products themselves. He also sees any change of heart on openness as a challenge when Apple continues to rake in huge cash with its current model."

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[Entropius]

Jobs wasn't an innovator. He came up with a few UI tricks using engineering advances that other people did the hard physics for.

What Jobs was was a marketer, and a good one.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[spire3661]

Jobs was OUSTED, he didnt leave.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[The Infamous Grimace]

You're talking about the 'Breakout' [telegraph.co.uk] incident.

Re:Jobs is marketing, Woz is engineering

[uglyduckling]

I disagree. The original iPod was an engineering feat. I know all the technology was already available, but that's the point of engineering - to do something clever and slick that works really, really well, by seeing and understanding what other people have missed. Same for the original iMac - it was a design and engineering triumph, totally iconic. The marketing was there too, but both are needed. See the Commodore Amiga for an example of great engineering and crummy marketing - and also the desire to maintain backwards compatibility holding back what could have been an amazing line of computers.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[luke923]

Chances are it was an outside agencies that wrote the sales pitch and that Jobs can't even really take credit for that either.

According to his most recent bio, that would be Regis McKenna.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[BackwardPawn]

It was when Atari was making a home version of Breakout and Jobs oversold his ability to create the product. Atari offered Jobs $750, plus a bonus for each chip Jobs could eliminate from the cartridge (by efficient programming). Jobs turn to Woz and told him they'd split the fee. Woz stayed up four nights programming breakout and did such an awesome job that Atari ended up paying Jobs $5,000. He paid Woz his $375 and kept the rest.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[Solandri]

This. While I do think Jobs is overrated, he's had one valuable contribution to the industry. Most other companies were content if their product worked, even if it shipped with a 300 page manual. Jobs was obsessed with making his products simple and easy to use, almost to a fault (e.g. only one button on the mouse).

IMHO it's this ease of use which is primarily responsible for Apple's success today. Regular people view computers as complicated, and computer geeks (e.g. the Linux community) as obsessed with that complexity. Apple has established a reputation for making computers easy to use, so they're the first (and often only) product people look at when buying a computing device, even if it costs more.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[ByOhTek]

As far as you are concerned, and reality, not necessarily the same thing.

Are any of pylons and struts on the top floor of a skyscraper the same exact ones as on the bottom (not identical, same)? Does that make the bottom irellevant? If Apple hadn't gotten off the ground, it wouldn't be here today. Apple now is NOT next, but a combination of the old Apple, and NeXT, both are extremely important to what it is today.

I maintain that Apple very likely would not be what it is today, without Woz.

The plane crash

[SgtChaireBourne]

A third reason is that he had a plane crash in 1981 which caused him to take a leave of absence. From what I read, it left some lasting, bad damage including memory loss [pcmag.com]. Between all that and being set for life, economically, he didn't have to go back.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[Entropius]

I dunno, I have a Mac that I have to use for work, and the UI sucks balls.

Besides: does this "ease of use" explain why I had to enter in fucking arcane escape sequences into the configs to make the Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys on my keyboard work?

Is that "just works?"

I think not.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[Just Some Guy]

Besides: does this "ease of use" explain why I had to enter in fucking arcane escape sequences into the configs to make the Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn keys on my keyboard work?

Since I have no idea what you're referring to as all the keys work out-of-the-box on my MacBook, I'm betting that you hit the "Linux User On A Mac" trap. You try to do something and it doesn't work as expected, so you reflexively Google for a solution and find a forum post for 2005 that kind of half-assed patches around the problem. Almost every time that's happened to me (as a Linux User On A Mac), I've later discovered that 1) there was another "native" way to do it with a couple of mouse clicks that were completely obvious in retrospect, or 2) I was trying to inflict a much more complicated workflow onto something much easier to use once I quit fighting it.

As far as I know, all Macs come with working movement keys. I hate to say this, but I think you were just using it wrong.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[motokochan]

The issue the parent had is that certain keys on the keyboard behave different from how UNIX and Windows traditionally handle them. For instance, PgUp and PgDown only scroll the viewport. They do not move the cursor. The fun is when you're very used to the cursor moving and then press one of the directional arrows to find you're back in the original position. You have to remember to click the mouse in the document to re-set the cursor position. Likewise, Home and End move the viewport to the very top and bottom of the viewport, not the expected beginning and ending of the line, if you're in a multi-line textbox.

So, while the keys do work, they are quite different from other OSes out there, leading to some very annoying behavior if you're keyboard-centric.