2 points:
What you fail to touch on is the fact that Apple gives a specific group of people specific tools for a specific job. Granted, I have found OS X and Mac Mini to be a great solution to general computing needs, but then again, I’m not everyone else.
There is a reason that Apple has done tremendously well over the past months and that reason is NOT an evil company holding people as slaves. It’s about a company enabling people by guaranteeing solutions that work the first time around. When Apple ceases to pull this off, their customer base will cease to grow.
To those who seem to be confused, a Mac is a massive dongle because it is (bar some major hacking) required to run OS X (for whatever good or bad reasons).
In the recent Mac marketing campaign I was shocked (well, shocked by a lot of the nonsense in it actually) by one of them boasting how it can run not only OS X, but Windows too! Let’s see a PC do that! Oh wait…they can’t because we won’t let it. You can argue it’s for good reasons to lock in the hardware, but you can’t then boast how you’re the only system to run everything like that’s a good thing.
With regards to Freedom Zero, I just go with that works. If that means forking over a little money, I will. If it means a degree of lock in, I will weigh it up a bit, but it won’t stop me necessarily. I have stuff to do and it needs to get done the best and easiest way possible, if I have to pay for that I will.
“There is a reason that Apple has done tremendously well over the past months and that reason is NOT an evil company holding people as slaves. It’s about a company enabling people by guaranteeing solutions that work the first time around. When Apple ceases to pull this off, their customer base will cease to grow”
No. Apple is not holding its user as slaves. Apple see their users as big fat sheep by selling overpriced commodity and you as user have to pay the Apple tax in order to get the key that unlock the OS X kingdom.
Jeff’s console analogy is spot on.
First of all, I commend you on this article! Apple will NEVER be a choice for me because of its proprietary needs.
To be quite frank, however, most computer users, and consumers in general, simply do not consider anything more than aesthetic beauty and the perceived status gained from owning a particular product. People will upgrade to Windows Vista because it’s graphically pretty, they bought the iPhone NOT because they needed a camera/mp3 player/phone/internet browser all in one device. They (the general audience) do not by Macs because they perceive a better product, just as Sony will be preferred as a laptop manufacturer over Acer or Toshiba.
It’s status and beauty. Apple sells well because it’s pretty and allows people to indulge in snobbery. It has since they introduced their rainbow colored iMacs about 10 years ago. Do you remember those? Sure, it was tangerine but I couldn’t right-click, the mouse felt god awful in my hand, and the keyboard was rickety cheap ass aqua-blue plastic. The iPod was no different with its ultra-minimalist white casing and simple display. It cost a small fortune compared to mp3/CD players on the market at the time (and infinitely more useful as i could play my existing CD collection as well as my not-quite-legal mp3’s on the same equipment. I still prefer using these devices). Later on you found out the hard-drives crapped out unexpectedly and you had to drop a few hundred dollars for a new replacement.
The iPhone is no different. People rushed out to buy them in multiples, only to find out that: 1) there wasn’t a limited supply so there wasn’t much resale value on ebay for those who couldn’t find them, and 2) a few months later prices were slashed, making it more available to the general public, and slightly less perceived as status symbol.
I have no clue what Freedom Zero is, but you can’t compare it to Apple, because Apple isn’t selling software nor hardware: they’re selling prestige.
Freedom 0 is just an ideal. Sure, software is one of the areas where this ideal is closest to reality, but still, even though you theoretically can write your own software in machine code, there’s a practical barrier to doing that. I can’t really see any one of Windows, OSX or consoles as being fundamentally unfair or infringing on Freedom 0, really; they are all tradeoffs of varying degrees, but they all have positives to show up for negatives. You are even given tools to build anything (Turing machine equivalent, anyway) on these platforms, with the exception of some of the consoles, which are, well, game machines, not really computing machines. What would really be alarming is “trusted computing”, but I just can’t see it happening any time soon.
As to the replies which say essentially “it’s my right to handicap my freedoms in whatever way I please, so shut up” … sure, but in that case I really need an explanation as to why does the US poke its nose into other countries’ business. How come you are very willing to deliver the freedom to elect an idiot as a ruler to people against their will, but don’t care about not having the freedom of switching essentially equivalent software yourselves?
I’m sorry if this sounds like a flame, it could well be that I’m just fed up with not ruling the world myself 
@ LastVisibleDog
Er, perhaps you missed my flying car reference. What Jeff wants is the computer equivalent of a flying car - its a ‘great’ idea but it will never happen. He wants Mac OS to be ‘free’ somehow to run on any platform.
Not gonna happen, so why kvetch about it?
Just like Linux will never be a desktop operating system for the masses. Why?
Cause no one cares. Nor should they.
Eric
All of this talk about “freedom” and “rights” and “fair” makes it sound like you’re talking about the government dealing with our human rights, not PRIVATELY OWNED companies building hardware and software platforms.
People don’t give a crap about freedom zero because Apple products get the job done with little fuss, and still accomplish pretty much any general purpose except for hardcore gaming. It’s a superior product built for people with less than superior computer operating abilities. The people who want “freedom zero” just go buy PCs, and get what Microsoft has now made a VASTLY inferior experience with Vista.
It’s already happened, Eric, just not legally. And you want to know why it won’t happen legally?
Because too few people care.
It’s not the technical aspect. Mac OS X is still heavily and notably BSD, and the driver support is out there. The various communities built around putting OS X on a non-Mac system have made it rather clear that the amount of work involved is not exactly vast. It’s not licensing, or anything else. It’s because it’s worth more money to Apple to only sell hardware.
People should care, though. There are some really non-trivial risks involved with zero freedom software.
It really comes down to the technical ability of this generation. There are still plenty of people alive who grew up without cell phones or even color TVs. For them, they don’t even know the difference between Windows, OSX, and Linux – what to talk of caring about which is a more open platform.
As always, time will be the true test. As the world population slowly becomes more and more technologically informed, their demand for flexibility in the technology they use will increase. And with this demand will come changes in the companies who have the power to make those changes possible. The company able to most quickly recognize those changes in demand will come out on top.
I care. I have a friend running ubuntu on his PS3, which he bought because it wasn’t useless like the 360 is. Sure, we’re still at their mercy, but deep down, sony knows that they have put themselves at ours, and if they don’t pull anything, we won’t; if they do, they’re going to get owned as hard as the Wii did.
I won’t buy HD-DVD, and I won’t buy Blu-ray. I stopped using windows even though I’m a gamer because I couldn’t put up with proprietary nonsense anymore. This year, I may become a KDE developer. I’ve HATED Apple for a while now, and I’m glad someone else is actually catching on.
I turned 18 a month ago. You can call my generation apathetic…
but I care.
i can’t reprogram my car, and i cannot change the firmware of my tv. But they work perfectly, and they do their job.
i don’t wan’t to waste my time to grind through the millions line of code of Linux or any other open software. I myself don’t will not work without getting paid. I pay happily for the good work of other, and that’s what i expect for mine work. that’s the way good products are created: money shows us the direction, where investment of time and will is rewarded.
Apple has done excellent work with the iPhone, it is better than all that other crap on the market (btw, there is NO “free” on the pda-market, googles wants to change, but only for selfish reasons).
btw: Do you use Microsoft? So, why do you talk about freedom then?
Your a pharisee, talking water, but drinking wine 
for people who fail to get the point of this post: if someone else made apple compatible computers that runs exactly the same as a mac, for 2/3 or 1/2 of the price would you buy it?
yipyip wrote:
“At least until the hypervisor is embedded in the hardware and even the BIOS has to be cryptographically signed and verified before booting. And that’s already halfway there in the server space. And when that happens in the consumer space, that’s when it really starts to hurt.”
I can see that, and I don’t see a big outcry over it. In the US you need a license to legally drive a car, fly an airplane, operate a radio station, etc. Yet each of those activities originally did not require it. I’m pretty sure all US readers can remember being able to board a plane without having a government issue ID.
I remember after buying my first car I had some thoughts on adding electronic flashing lights and such. I bragged about it to someone who told me what I had in mind was illegal.
So I am sure computers will eventually be required to be ‘Internet Legal’, similar to street-legal cars.
This one time at bandcamp I tried to copy my entire giant dongle but could not. I found out that the size of it made copying it hard.
At all the people making analogies like “A BMW is a giant dongle because I need to buy the car to use the onboard computer” (I belive it was stephan who made that specific one).
You make absolutely no sense. I don’t buy a BMW to use its onboard computer. And I don’t buy a Honda so it will fly. I buy them so I can DRIVE them. What Apple does is gives you the vehicle (the OS), but makes you buy overpriced gas (Hardware) from them. Yes, you can drive all your other vehicles with that gas. But you can’t drive OSX with any other hardware.
I wonder what the Apple fanboys would say if MS suddenly decided that XP and Vista shouldn’t run on Macs anymore
IMO, it’s similar to David Heinemeier Hansson’s thoughts on opinionated software: good software has an opinion on the best way to do things. Great software lets you keep the defaults (sound familiar), but override them if necessary. It may be that open source software projects are hard to have a singular vision of the best way to do something. Ergo, it dilutes the opinions of the software creators.
Does it have to be like this? I don’t know.
Vizeroth wrote:
“You can still board a plane in the US without a government-issued ID (in fact, most people do board planes without a federally-approved ID, since most states don’t issue them, yet). In order to board a plane without any ID, though, you not only have to buy the ticket with cash, but submit to the more thorough security screening that some people are randomly subjected to anyway. In some cases, it’s the fastest way to get on a plane if you don’t mind people rifling through your carry-on luggage and patting you down. Besides that, the identification requirements haven’t really changed much in the last 25 or more years.”
Which is why I didn’t say federally-approved. State governments are still governments. Homeland Security has at least twice threatened to disallow Utah drivers licenses (Utah is where I live) as valid ID in the last five years unless the state made changes in the way they were issued. I will grant that you can board without a valid ID because I did once with TSA doing the procedure you describe. However, I can remember traveling in the late '80s without anyone asking for any ID, and only getting asked sporadically in the early '90s. Requests for valid ID did not become consistent until the late '90s. Even then, I only needed it to board; if I was walking someone to the gate, or meeting them at the gate, no one asked for ID. Does the majority of people object to TSA requiring a boarding pass now to get to a gate?
“As for computers being required to be ‘internet legal’, it would require a few things that certainly would set off some alarms early in the process, especially since it would require changes to the protocol itself that would make not only the end-users’ PCs incompatible, but most likely the servers and routers that make the internet worthwhile incompatible.”
I think it will be gradual. I worked for one company for 17 years. They originally did not require virus software, or restrict what software you could run. When I left, virus software was a must, and you were on probation if you ran anything not on the approved list of applications (the joke for me was that some of the apps they sold were not on the list, and if you were a developer and modified a program, you got a warning). Most companies I interviewed with restricted their employees Internet access to websites, and have policies on what applications they can use. It’s not a far leap to doing that with individual computers, servers, and routers. Intel tried a few years ago to put unique ID’s in their Pentiums. The Utah legislature considered a bill last year that would impose fines on anyone with an unsecured WiFi network. It will happen, and few will object.
The more options you have, the more choices you must make.
Take Windows Vista. Most people don’t really want to figure out which of the five versions they should buy. If you’re a business owner, you’re going to be dealing with important, sensitive data. Yet Bitlocker encryption isn’t included business edition. You must buy the Ultimate Edition instead. So, as an end user, you actually have to read the list of features, figure out their intended purpose and then evaluate them in comparison to your needs as a business owner. This is in contrast to having the freedom to spend your time doing something else, such as run your business or spend time with your family.
I buy Apple hardware because Apple usually includes the kinds of features I want. In fact, it often includes features that I didn’t know I wanted, such as the MagSafe power connector or backlit keyboard. I don’t have to shop around and choose between thousands of laptop models to choose a set of features that will likely meet my needs and wants.
Compare this to “features” such as the Windows Sideshow found on some laptops. I don’t want the extra cost, weight or all around clutter that it brings. Nor would it do me much good when my laptop is inside my bag. As a potential buyer, I either need to trust the that this feature actually adds value or I’m forced to analyze what it does and figure out if it’s something I really need.
If my MacBook Pro is not in my bag, then it’s open and I’m looking at it’s high resolution screen. If I want to know how much charge I have left, I can push a button on the battery and get a simple LED visual display of power remaining. If I want to tell how many unread emails I have at a glance, I’ll use a more portable and accessible device, such as my iPhone, instead of taking my laptop out of my bag. These are, IMHO, much better solutions to the same problems.
And you simply can’t get anything like the iPhone or the MacBook Air anywhere else. In this case, Apple as a company is “dongle” for a specific set of features and level of design.
I wonder how many posters here actually used OS X. It just works, its rock solid, its refined a few orders of magnitude more than Windows XP and Vista. At work I program all day in Visual Studio, at home I use OS X for the rest of my life. My feeling is Microsoft will be relegated to the corporate sphere, Apple will dominate the consumer side. And I’m quite ok with that.