Tinkering

Mark Pilgrim: "Now, I am aware that you will be able to develop your own programs for the iPad, the same way you can develop for the iPhone today. Anyone can develop! All you need is a Mac, XCode, an iPhone 'simulator,' and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. The 'developer certificate' is really a cryptographic key that (temporarily) allows you (slightly) elevated access to... your own computer. And that's fine - or at least workable - for the developers of today, because they already know that they're developers. But the developers of tomorrow don't know it yet. And without the freedom to tinker, some of them never will." - CAUTION: Mark's pretty free with the F-bomb, but the article is worth a read. The thing that really caught my eye, and my full attention, was one of Marks own comments in the comments section, it reads...

People haven't figured it out yet, but Mac OS X is on its last legs. By 2015, Apple will make appliances and developer add-ons. Not general purpose computing devices.

WOW, WHAT A BOLD STATEMENT! He might be right.

Labels: Apple, iPad, iPhone, Mac

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Published:: 12:14 PM; by Rob

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Rob Fahrni has been a Software Developer for 20 years. He's developed DOS, Windows, Linux, iPhone, and Palm based applications in C, C++, Objective-C/Cocoa, C#/ASP.Net, and, yes, even BASIC...
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Jerry Fahrni, Pharmacy Informatics and Technology

RxCalc - A Pharmacokinetic Calculator for iPhone

Prasenjeet 3:46 PM

> By 2015, Apple will make appliances and developer add-ons. Not general purpose computing devices.

I doubt they'll *kill* it. But I'm pretty sure that by 2015, the cheapest general-purpose Mac will be in the $1000 ballpark. They'll make you pay for the flexibility, the way Sun made you pay for their high-performance workstations.

iPads and their ilk ("no-root devices") on the other hand will be pushed hard and sold, often subsidized, in conjunction with data plans, and newspaper/magazine/video subscriptions. You could subscribe to (say) the NYTimes and a video-on-demand package and pick up an iPad for $99.

In this market, only gearheads will want a general-purpose PC, denting the economies of scale that made the cheap $400 PC possible and driving up prices even for non-Mac PC makers.

Ok, that's pretty much my nightmare. And it just might not turn out like that. E.g., Chrome OS's design notes talk about a mode where the user can flip a switch to enable "dev mode", and run their own programs on the machine. That gives me some hope.

Tinkering

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