Geeks, Tinkerers and the iPad
Alex Payne posted a much-linked-to article, basically calling out the iPad as a closed system for consumption, not production.
First of all—and a personal pet peeve—it’s flat-out wrong to call the iPhone/iPad “closed.” What Alex and others really mean to say is that the App Store is “closed,” but even that is misleading. It’s more accurate to say the App Store is “edited,” as it’s open to any paid developer’s submissions. Something like 96% of apps are approved. Yes, Apple controls the editorial process, but the App Store is not the only way to distribute apps; it’s just by far the most convenient.
Alex’s critique is really a technical and esoteric feature request for a “Run Untrusted Apps” option (which I sort of doubt he has filed officially), but that is technically problematic. Only App Store apps are required to be “sandboxed,” so untrusted apps could indeed do terribly malicious things. Apple could sandbox those apps at the system level (chroot), but then they would be nearly as restricted as App Store apps. What’s the point?
If history teaches us anything, it’s that there’s no keeping a good geek down. Geeks will shell out for the SDK, develop web apps (don’t laugh—WebGL is going to change everything), or use new iPad-native development tools. Remember, when the Mac came out, the only way to develop for it was Pascal on a $10,000 Lisa. And while die-hard geeks may have laughed at HyperCard in 1987, it’s how many developers got their start—myself included. So calling the iPhone OS ecosystem the “end of the hacker era” is way premature, not to mention hyperbolic.
Just as hyperbolic is Alex’s suggestion that the iPad is a “digital consumption machine.” If no apps are ever made for the iPad, he would be mostly right (but don’t forget about iWork). Of course, that will not be the case. Thousands of iPad-only apps will be made, and along with the games, there will be productivity and creative apps that will blow your socks off. Brushes is the tiny tip of a very large iceberg.
Time will tell, but I predict the iPad is not the tinkerer’s sunset, but rather will become a tinkerer’s paradise. That’s precisely why I’m excited about it.
