“Louis Sullivan's phrase "form (ever) follows function" became a battle-cry of Modernist architects after the 1930s.” (Wikipedia) Apple ever retained this motto after Jobs brought the company to its pinnacle of making computer technology appetizing to the eye. Whether it by hardware or by operating system. His followers rabid as they are (I was one of them so leave me be we did froth at the mouth so get over it) raised him financially up so he could be even more penchant with his design and proprietariness. This is when I dropped off the radar because the epiphany hit me. I’d have to have $3K expendable income every other year just keep up (hardware & version wise) with the updates his team rolled out. No thanks. I can’t justify that kind of behavior in my life and I couldn't help feeling like a consumer whore after it all said and done. I’ll take my chances elsewhere.
Time marched by and netbooks rolled out and I got on board with an EeePC from Asus. Loved the concept despised the limitations they rolled out with the first gen of a brilliant idea and the kicker was it was affordable! You nearly said after spending just a few hundred bucks so what if it dies after spilling a latte on it. Though for the record these were tough little devices. Something light and small I can carry around easy enough check online what I needed maybe respond to an email and then you close up shop. Obviously you do not want to do heavy work on it but there you were. Like any great idea it got perverse quickly and spread around too much and the price went up and up.
Thank God the idea stuck that the people wanted something they can carry about that was connected into the networks out there yet light enough not to weigh you down. Thus pads/tablets are in. Just when everyone also said, “Hey I want a lightweight operating system too. Not something that is going to take all my disk space up.” Android and Moblin launched. I’m eager to see how all of this plays out but on the horizon there still is Google OS as well. Don’t get me wrong the “traditional” flavors of OS’s out there are still there and ready to be used as well but let’s face the facts you have two choices to make. Buy the ‘it connects to EVERYTHING OS like Windows, Apple, (free) Linux’ (I went by market share) or get the free light weight it may only connect to most things and printing is going to be hard OS. Now I stretched that out because these are still under much evolutionary change and development and the goal is to be connected to everything eventually but they have to test the living crap out of it before just dumping it onto you. The end user. Free usually is like that but hey FREE hello?
I mentioned the words light weight and what I mean by that is not only size (physical space on your hard drive) I also mean it will lack things that aren’t core essential to run faster. The tendency I have witnessed many times over is you put the full blown version of anything onto a mobile device and it crawls to the point where you want to throw it at your IT person or the sales person who stuck you with it. Of course that is not a wise idea (I like the blood to stay inside my body). Thus the idea of a light weight operating system is born. You have to note if it has a hard disk drive the RPM’s are much slower than your desktop hard drive and the system has to run on a battery also so power isn’t consistent. These things coupled with the end user (you) go to every ad plastered gossip, news, picture, porn, sports related site out there and get tons of garbage temporary files downloaded onto your system (which I blame the OS not being intelligent enough to toss out when done!). Add a dash of a few corrupt essential files or malware and you got yourself a device you want to throw at someone. Voila`! Light weight helps with this because it has just the essentials and the engineering isn’t geared toward the ‘typical every stationary desk top user scenario’ situation it is geared toward a device being carried around and the “what do we do with these devices typically” scenario. This mentality carried through its entire design so what you ended up with is a smaller physical size (which my EeePC loves [4 Gig SSD hello!]) and just the essential stuff necessary to connect to EVERYTHING wireless and the ports to survive out there. USB, removable data cards, etc.
Enter the iPad. As we all know and as far as I'm aware of still suffering from the economy took a crap. There is Apple still pushing the next addictive consumer grade product because like Midas everything Jobs is touching is turning to gold on the market despite the fact that people are losing employment, homes, life savings. So listening as he does to what ‘the people want’ then sticking and ‘i’ on it we now have the next super device that fits all the above requirements and since their core OS really is just a beefed up version of UNIX. There won’t be a problem with making this the next thing you “have” to have or you could just do what every other “price-sensitive” (Curtis Franklin Jr.) Apple user does and wait for them to go dirt cheap on eBay and buy it up then. Long in short they hit the shelves first and did extremely well. Why not there wasn’t anyone else out there? That in itself is amazing despite a shitty economic crisis people still wanted to spend what no extra money they had on an ‘i’ something to have in their home. Way to go Steve! I doubt other makers would have had the same ability to pull that off I sincerely mean that.
Then this article rolls out announcing the release of Asus’s EeePC Pad. I’m thrilled let me tell you! Competitive hardware specs and good weight and size. Did they copy the hell out of you know who HELL yes they did. They had to! To answer the question with your title of the article Curtis yes they can! Will they be better? Hell no Curtis! They are shipping with a stripped down embedded version of Windows hello? Look at prices though. Well priced and it is almost as if they know their OS won’t compete and will probably suck and that’s why it is lower. Sad part is they say the licensing is why it is so high in price. So high? So if you didn’t have to deal with Windows licensing you wouldn’t have it priced at $450 for the 12” model of this device? It would be even lower? Hmmmm…
So here is the article:
PCWorld Article by Curtis Franklin Jr.
Here is the quote I’m blogging about:
“Apple's competitors are betting that a rich hardware feature set and (possible) lower price will attract users who see the potential in an ultra-portable tablet but aren't ready to join the Apple universe. The iPhone has shown that, while Apple can make a market that includes rivals, the Cupertino tech giant will keep most of the market for itself, leaving competitors to pick up the price-sensitive or Apple-averse for themselves.”
Mr. Franklin Jr. the ‘price sensitive’ or ‘Apple-averse’ folks out there you are discussing about are people who recognize inside of a reeling economy that money is best spent wisely. Those who are Apple-averse are possibly those who enjoyed Apple for a time but soon realized that to keep up with how much money Apple demanded was simply ludicrous. Look around Mr. Franklin EVERYONE would love an operating system that ran smoothly and securely. Unfortunately it was Gates who got to the first position with that and we got one out of two, maybe. If anything we can thank Microsoft for giving us the contrast to see that an operating system that ran like Apple’s OS is better but it doesn’t have to be Apple’s product. It helps us in our patiently waiting for a ‘real product’ to roll out that does not behave like Windows nor be proprietary like MacOS nor deal with the bash command line headaches that free Linux serves up. When that one developer rolls out something that just has it all and kicks major ass in reviews I’m there. Until then with this economy don’t be surprised if I’m thinking with wallet first, security second, and ease of use last.
My issue with all of this is in a reeling economy one can only wonder how badly they all want to get into our wallets. Pretty badly? Yes, but the operating system is a lot of engineering and they deserve something back for all of that time. How much profit is enough? How much do you stick your hands into the end users pocket to cover what was spent in development? How long do you think Steve people will put up with you plastering an ‘i’ on anything and calling it a gem of Louis Sullivan’s architectural philosophy? Has it run its course yet? Listen man I appreciate what you and Woz came up with all those years ago. Eventually in my opinion the perfect graphic designer’s wet dream of a digital tool, but I cannot endorse handing over time and time again all that money. In short, ridiculous. What’s next the iToaster, iToilet, iBroom? It makes sense to be compensated for your work YES but squeezing 8K percent profit every time you hear the register go cha-ching is compounding the problems out there. The part that frightens me most is the cattle keep going out there to buy it because you say so. Ironic, how in the 1984 ad you’ve become that which you were demonstrating against. Is that capitalism coming full circle for you? You’ve changed a world of computing give yourself a pat on the back, you’ve secured a company’s future that was in a nose dive be thrilled, now think ahead on how to unify a race. You have the means. Look in your own back yard.
You have one of the easiest to use, secure, operating systems out there. The world is computing like it or not. They are all jacked in somehow some way. I challenge you create a light version and give it away. Have it work on AMD / Intel alike. Call it iLite OS or some ‘i’ derivative I’m sure your team will have a good name to throw on it. Get the world on it and if they choose to have all the bells and whistles they can toss their money onto the full blown version. Can you hear it Steve? “If you build it they will come.” When you see how the world changes on it you’ll then understand the positive power you truly have. Money is just a thing. We are the source. You sensed it when your adoring fans backed you at every MacExpo. When you have the source behind you the world unifies and listens.
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