Tag Archives: Apple

Connecting some tech news dots

27 February: Freescale announces a KL02 ARM chip, just 2mm across.

Freescale says that the KL02 was specifically designed in response to a customer’s request. (They aren’t saying who.) There was a need for a chip smaller than 3 by 3 mm and this was the result. Who needs a chip this tiny? We look forward to finding out — we think.

When a component manufacturer dare not speak the name of its customer, you can make a pretty good guess who they’re talking about. Sure enough, just a week later, we discover the answer: Apple’s Lightning connector to HDMI adaptor is taken apart, and discovered to have a tiny ARM chip inside.

So let’s review: when Apple decided to switch connectors on the iPhone, they could have gone with Micro USB and MHL. After all, they already agreed to adopt Micro USB for charging back in 2009. Adding MHL would have allowed them to stream full 1080p/60 HDMI through a Micro USB connector.

But no, instead they went with a new proprietary Apple-only connector. And they made it so crap that it can’t stream 1080p. So now they have to stick an ARM CPU in every high-priced adaptor cable, to decode MPEG-compressed video. Never mind the artifacts that result, Apple gets to charge connector licensing fees, and that’s what’s important.

What a horrible piece of proprietary engineering.

SMS is useless

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of SMS, the mobile phone Short Message Service. Coincidentally, I needed to ask my cousin a question. He wasn’t available via instant messaging, so I resorted to sending a text message to his mobile number.

A lot of people don’t realize that SMS is not guaranteed delivery. The network(s) may simply drop the messages if they lack capacity or if the recipient’s phone is out of service area. There’s no guaranteed delivery time either. Knowing this, I had turned on Delivery Reports for each message in my SMS client.

The three messages were sent, and shortly afterwards all three were flagged as delivered.

Just one problem: They didn’t arrive at my cousin’s phone.

It turns out that “Delivery Reports” for SMS can mean almost anything. In this case, one of the networks was sending a delivery report, rather than actually waiting until the message was delivered to the recipient.

When I got no reply after a few hours, I followed up with e-mail. But the point is this: SMS is useless if you care about whether the message is received or not.

For the technically minded, it’s like a UDP datagram. There are no guarantees. Your message may be delivered days late, spuriously repeated, or never delivered at all. I’ve had all of these happen, even just sending messages within the USA. I had naïvely thought that delivery receipts might help, but no, they don’t provide any useful knowledge beyond a guarantee that at least your own network provider has received the message.

BlackBerry understood this. Their BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) had the killer feature of reporting (via small icons) that the message was actually delivered to the recipient’s handset, and whether it had actually been displayed on their screen yet. BBM is the single thing from my BlackBerry days that I still miss, but unfortunately it remains exclusive to the dying BlackBerry platform.

So, what’s the alternative that does work for everyone?

My preference is for XMPP, also known as Jabber. Use Google Talk, or AOL Instant Messanger, or Apple’s mac.com via iChat/Messages, or any of thousands of other other Jabber providers, and you’re on a single open unified instant messaging network. It’s like e-mail—you can use your choice of client, your choice of network, and still talk to anyone.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies trying to entice people into “walled gardens”, proprietary chat networks that force your friends to use their service if you want to communicate. The three big proprietary closed networks are those of Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

Apple have iMessage—which only has clients for iOS and the latest Mac OS X, making it pretty spectacularly useless unless you disown all your disloyal friends.

Facebook have a messaging service that supports XMPP, but unfortunately they refuse to connect to any other XMPP provider, so they can strongarm your friends into keeping an active Facebook account.

Microsoft’s closed proprietary network is Skype. They used to have another which went by various names including MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, but they’re shutting that one down next year, so if you use it you might as well make your migration plans now.

Then there’s Kik, which basically clones the iPhone chat UI and makes it cross-platform. Unfortunately they have no web, Mac or Linux clients, as well as being a closed network.

The final proprietary offering I’ll mention is WhatsApp. It’s phone-only, unlike XMPP, and closed and proprietary, but it does at least support reliable delivery notifications. It has clients for all the major mobile platforms. I have it installed, purely because everyone in my family does. Apparently it’s the current market leader in the “replacements for SMS” space.

So, I’ve given up on SMS. It’s a waste of time unless you arrange with your friends that they will always send acknowledgements to your messages—and who wants to have to do that? While I wait for everyone to get on the XMPP train, I’m reluctantly using WhatsApp. So please don’t text me.

Dear Apple: It’s not me, it’s you

Apple is asking for another $707m in damages from Samsung, in addition to the $1b they were already awarded in the ludicrous patent trial. They also asked for a permanent ban on 29 different Samsung phones — i.e. all the phones that are successfully competing with the iPhone.

Meanwhile, Apple’s new iOS 6 purges YouTube and Google Maps. The former is now available as a separate app, but the latter has been replaced with Apple’s own mapping app — which is apparently disastrously awful.

After promising the EU that they would settle on a standard MicroSD connector for charging, like every other phone manufacturer, Apple instead launched a new proprietary connector, incompatible with their three previous generations of proprietary dock connector. There was absolutely no need for this — if they were going to be incompatible, they could have switched to Micro USB with MHL and provided exactly the same functionality over a standard connector. But of course, then they wouldn’t have been able to charge $40 for an adaptor cable.

But of course, the sheep are lining up to buy the iPhone 5 anyway.

On the Mac side of things, OS X 10.8 came out. It was said to be a bit better than 10.7, but still not as good as 10.6. New functionality? Well, there’s a messenger program that’s useless to me because it only talks to iPhones and other Macs. There’s a file transfer program that’s useless to me because it only talks to other Macs. There’s a new video chat app that’s useless to me because it only talks to iPhones and other Macs. There’s a notepad app that’s useless to me because… You get the idea. Oh, and perfectly good apps like iCal and Address Book got ugly faux-leather makeovers.

iDVD, which I use, is gone. iSync, which I use, is gone. X11, which I use, is no longer bundled. Most GPL-licensed open source software is either shipped in obsolete versions or has been removed entirely. And of course, there’s that new Gatekeeper feature, which by default only lets you run software Apple approves of, though you can bet I don’t trust that to remain the situation in future releases, as the iPhone and iPad are still locked down.

As far as hardware, the new MacBooks have batteries glued in so you can’t change them, RAM soldered in so you can’t upgrade it, and a proprietary SSD connector so you can’t even upgrade the drive easily. There’s no Ethernet port, no optical drive. I realized that there’s absolutely no way I want to buy such a machine.

Which means it’s now getting on for two years since Apple put out any kind of product that was remotely of interest to me, software or hardware. That and the continuing douchebaggery of their lawsuits have driven me from hedging my bets and not purchasing new software for the Mac platform, to actively planning to abandon it.

So far:

  • The iPods are done with. Replaced by a Sansa Clip Zip, with a 32GB MicroSD expansion card to give me 40GB total.
  • The Apple TV has had its tasks taken over by the PlayStation 3.
  • DEVONthink Pro is Mac only, so I’ve taken all my archives out of that and put them in Evernote. Ditto for Circus Ponies Notebook.
  • Pages has been replaced with ConTeXt and LibreOffice.
  • Numbers has been replaced with Google Docs spreadsheets and LibreOffice.
  • iPhoto has been replaced with Corel AfterShot Pro, which produces better photos into the bargain.
  • iChat (for video chat) has been replaced with Google Hangouts. (Video is jerkier but higher resolution, audio is significantly better.)

I don’t have a replacement for Ableton Live yet. I’m hoping that Bitwig Studio will ship and be affordable.

iMovie and iDVD I’m not sure about. I haven’t done much video editing recently. There are three or four Linux packages I can try, so I’m just going to deal with that problem when I hit it.

I guess I’m going to have to learn to deal with the GIMP as my Photoshop replacement.

Apple Mail proved surprisingly tough to replace. I expected to just use Thunderbird, but the latest release of Thunderbird is a complete disaster. So, I’m moving all my e-mail archives into Gmail (which fortunately now offers enough space to hold them all), and I’ll keep a backup just in case and hope I don’t need it.

So yeah. Sorry, Apple, it’s not me, it’s you. Steve Jobs saved you, but he also set you on a path to evil and eventual ruin. I begged you to change, but you didn’t listen, so here we are. After 22 years as a devoted Apple customer, it’s over. Enjoy the money from the masses while you’re getting it, I have a hunch it won’t last for much longer, and you’re driving away all of us who supported you through the difficult times.

I think I’m past the angry and bitter stage. I’ve moved on to looking forward to how much money I’ll save, and how much easier it’ll be to get open source projects working. One thing I’m not looking forward to, though, is doing all the research to find out what machine to buy…

Of MP3 players and Apple complacency

We have four iPods of various ages and sizes: one of the first models with the dock connector, one of the early click wheel ones, a nano with clip, and a nano with a screen. One of the classic iPods lives in the car, the other I used the rest of the time; the two nanos are rothko’s.

These four iPods appear to need at least three different charging cables. The “universal” USB cable from Apple that works with the dock iPod doesn’t work with the click wheel one, and makes it crash. The cable that came with the nano won’t power the dock iPod. The other nano needs a special tiny cable. This is crap. It’s bad enough that Apple’s audio players still need a special proprietary cable; the fact that I have three players which have the same physical connector but can’t share a single cable is utterly inexcusable. Maybe they should be compatible, but here in my reality they aren’t.

Let’s talk about iTunes too. I’m a Mac user, so I get to use the less awful version. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Apple have stopped doing user-focused design and started doing marketing-focused design.

I don’t want an app store in my music player. I will never purchase an app from it, and the work iPad can access the app store directly anyway. It’s just bloat, complexity, and irritating advertising. Similarly, I don’t need a library in my music player; I will never buy a book from Apple.

While we’re at it, even though I’m one of the rare individuals to own an AppleTV, I don’t want a movie rental store or a TV show store in my music player. I can rent shows directly on the device, which is far more convenient because it means I can start watching them immediately.

I certainly don’t want a social network in iTunes, and nor does anyone else as far as I can tell. I mean, does anyone use Ping? I’ve never heard anyone talk about using it, ever.

I know 145MB is nothing these days, but it still seems way too much for an MP3 player, which is what I use iTunes for 99% of the time. I think Apple must know it too, but they can’t give us the slimline MP3 player we want because the marketing department is in control at Apple. It’s all about the ecosystem now. The iPod has 90%+ of the MP3 player market, so everyone has to use iTunes to load music on their MP3 players. Hence Apple shoves anything into iTunes that they want to try and push people to use. The ability to hide the Store section from the left side of the iTunes window is conspicuous by its absence. The store will advertise apps at you, and even books for iOS developers, and you get no say in the matter. I was surprised that the Mac app store didn’t get shoehorned into iTunes too.

I’m someone who uses the iTunes store for music sometimes, and I still find all this spam irritating. I can only imagine how rage-inducing it must be for people who have no interest at all in buying from iTunes, and just want to sync their MP3 players or play a CD.

It wouldn’t be so bad having all the crap in iTunes if the basic stuff all worked, but it doesn’t. Our music’s all on a network music server, served up via Apple’s DAAP protocol, but as far as the “Genius” and “iTunes DJ” features are concerned, it doesn’t exist. You can’t sync network music to the iPod either, you have to copy it to your local hard disk first. When ripping CDs, cover art mysteriously fails to get written to the MP3s unless I run an AppleScript to fiddle with the metadata and leave the machine to sit and think about it for a while. The streaming from the music server broke in the last version of iTunes, too, because Apple made incompatible changes to the protocol without telling anyone. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t just disable it entirely, like they did in the last AppleTV update.

Most of the time I keep the same music on my iPods. Every now and again I’ll take an album off that I’m not listening to, and put on a new one which I just bought. This, of course, means I need to manage the devices manually; though since I have more media than will fit on any one device, that’s a given anyway. As soon as you have to take the manual management route, iTunes ceases to be an asset and starts being a pain in the ass. You can’t just drag a bunch of music files onto your iPod; that would be much too simple. Instead you have to drag the files into the iTunes library, then go and find them in the iTunes library, then select them again, then drag them to the iPod. It’s an entire extra set of file management tasks. Deleting from the iPod is almost as bad; you may have a handy playlist with the stuff you want to delete in it, but you can’t just delete it from there. Instead you have to click on the disclosure triangle, go into the Music sub-entry, find the files via search, and then delete them. And all the time, iTunes does its best to make sure that everything it knows about is neatly arranged in folders on your hard drive, by artist then album. It’s like it’s mocking you, organizing everything so that it would be really easy to just drag-copy it with the Finder, then refusing to let you do so.

Then there’s the effect of Apple’s market dominance on the MP3 player market. What I want in an MP3 player is pretty simple: a small screen, a long battery life, and a high capacity. None of Apple’s players meet those basic needs, even if you’re willing to put up with a proprietary cable. The current iPod Nano is the closest, but that’s stuck at a maximum of 16GB with no way to expand it. Everyone else seems to have given up making high capacity MP3 players, or even given up making MP3 players altogether.

All of this is why I gave up on Apple, Sony and the other big brands in portable audio, and picked up a Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip. It’s only 8GB, but it has the all-important MicroSD slot on the side. Since 32GB MicroSD cards can be picked up for around $20 these days, you can have a 40GB flash-based MP3 player for less than the price of an 8GB iPod Nano.

If that doesn’t sound good, consider this: No more iTunes. Plug in the MP3 player via a standard micro USB cable (like the one used by my phone, my Kindle, etc) and it mounts as a disk drive on any Windows, Mac or Linux system. Drop a folder of music into the Music folder and you’re done. (Oh, and this player will play FLAC and Ogg files if you like, as well as MPEG-4 from the iTunes Store and good old MP3.)

Just one more thing: The Clip Zip can drive a full size pair of Shure DJ-style headphones and give you good sound quality doing it. Boom. Try that with an iPod.

Technology and morality

The New Republic recently carried an interesting article about Apple (the full text may be available via Readability). The piece started out as a review of the Steve Jobs biography (ho hum), but soon diverged into a discussion of the morality of design. It helped me to crystallize some thoughts.

There’s a famous anecdote about how Steve Jobs spent weeks making his family discuss what they wanted from their washing machine.

Jobs’s meticulous unpacking of the values embedded in different washing machines, and his insistence on comparing them to the values he wanted to live by, would be applauded by moralistic philosophers of technology from Heidegger to Ellul, though it may be a rather arduous way of getting on with life. But Jobs understood the central point that philosophers of technology had tried (and failed) to impart: that technology embodies morality.

Emphasis mine. Technology may be morally neutral in the abstract, but when we make technology choices, we are making moral choices, either because of the details of how the technology is made, or because the technology filters moral possibilities.

The problem was that Jobs, while perfectly capable of interrogating technology and asking all the right questions about its impact on our lives, blatantly refused to do so when it came to his own products. He may have been the ultimate philosopher of the washing machine, but he offered little in the way of critical thinking about the values embedded in the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPad. When he discussed his own products, he switched from philosophical reflection on the effects of consumer choices to his Bauhaus mode of the vatic designer.

I would put it this way: Towards the end of his life, Jobs took his passion for product design in the autocratic and paternalistic mode, and applied it to everything about the products he oversaw.

“Steve believed it was our job to teach people aesthetics, to teach people what they should like,” [one of his ex-girlfriends] said.

This is the real reason why the App Store exists. This is why iOS is locked down, and why the Mac is being moved to an App Store model. Sure, the revenue stream is welcome, but it’s really about paternalistic control.

“It just works”—Jobs’s signature promise at product launches—was soothing to a nation excited and addled and traumatized by technology. Nothing could go wrong: Apple had thought of everything. The technology would work as advertised; it was under total control; it would not get hacked.

This is the new Apple philosophy. Sacrifice control to paternalistic Apple, and you can relax. The benevolent leader will teach you what to like and what not to like, keep you safe from danger and ugliness. The fact that this philosophy is utterly opposed to the values expressed in so much Apple advertising is remarkable, and shows how cunning and slick their advertising and marketing people really are.

People fall for it, too. I know many self-professed libertarians who believe in absolute freedom of speech and say that they trust nobody to be a censor, but who nevertheless line up to buy iPhones and iPads and give Apple control over what software they can run on their phone, what books and magazines they can read on their tablet, even how they are allowed to arrange app icons. (Try removing Newsstand from your iPad.) Business travelers with iPads complain all the time about being forced to submit to the TSA when they take a plane flight, but what is the App Store if not the TSA of software?

Some iOS users engage in doublethink, recasting their lack of “freedom to” as a positive “freedom from”. (“Sure, I’m not free to download a wifi scanner… but I’m free from viruses!”) It’s true, all apps have metaphorically gone through the scanner and had a minimum-wage drone check their boarding pass, and you can be sure they aren’t carrying bottles of water that compete with the drinks sold by the gate, but that’s not how real security works.

Some iOS device owners ease their sense of guilt by rooting the device, ignoring that they’ve already cast a powerful vote for loss of freedom by buying it. Most, however, seem content to live in cognitive dissonance, apologetically pointing out that Apple hasn’t been that bad a dictator, and has mostly not eliminated competing services. I mean, yes, they’ve forced other magazine and book sellers to move their stores to web only to escape Apple control, but so far they haven’t blocked those web sites, so it’s OK, right?

Which brings us to the web. Criticize the lack of freedom represented by the iOS devices, and before long you’ll likely be told that it’s simply not a problem, because there’s a web browser. Sure, Apple says no porn on the iPad, but you can get porn on the web via Safari so somehow there’s no censorship occurring. But people are pointing out that Apple’s ‘app economy’ is increasingly threatening the web itself. Apple (and other corporate entities like Amazon) are managing to mold the web to be what they want it to be. And that doesn’t appear to be what I want it to be.

[...] Jobs outright rejected the possibility that there may be a multiplicity of irreconcilable views as to what the Web is and what it should be. For him, it is only a “direct-to-customer distribution channel.” In other words, Jobs believed that the Web is nothing more than an efficient shopping mall, and he proceeded to build his business around what he believed to be the Web’s essence.

Some people even claim that the web is dead, and that as we move into a post-PC era of tablets and phones as the primary Internet access devices, the web will be replaced by apps. And freedom will be replaced with complete corporate control.

Our choice is between erecting a virtual Portland or sleepwalking into a virtual Dallas. But Apple under Steve Jobs consistently refused to recognize that there is something valuable to the Web that it may be destroying.

A virtual Dallas, a prospect that will make every Austin web developer shudder.

So I now realize that this is where I parted company with Apple. When the Jobsian paternalism was restricted to matters of hardware design, I mostly appreciated it. I wish my laptop had a replaceable battery and anti-reflective screen, but mostly I’m happy with what I was told I should like—the large trackpad, the solid metal casing, and so on.

But when the paternalism was extended to books and movies and video games and applications, and when it started to threaten the web—well, that was several steps too far.

Everyone says they love freedom, and that freedom is important. But as the cliché says, “freedom isn’t free”. Freedom means ugliness. Freedom means danger. Freedom means complexity. Apple, in a stroke of marketing genius, offers you freedom from those things. And by accompanying that promise with images of freethinkers and a ‘think different’ message, it manages to make you overlook the fact that what you are really doing is giving up your freedom, and financially rewarding the very entity you are giving it up to.

So what’s the alternative? Well, sadly you won’t find a mobile platform with a rich ecosystem that doesn’t require ceding some control to others. Many people have said to me “Well, since that’s the case, what’s the point? I might as well go with the best.” But I’m not an absolutist; I don’t believe in the idea that if you can’t be perfect, you might as well not try. Rather, when it’s time to make a choice, I’ll choose the imperfect option that’s better.

Even Google, with its naïve technocratic ethos, is more committed to questioning the impact that it is having on the Internet and the world at large. They fund a bevy of academic and policy initiatives; they have recently launched a Berlin-based think tank dedicated to exploring the social impact of the Internet; they even started a quarterly magazine. [...] Apple, by contrast, holds itself above the fray. It seems to believe that such discussions of meanings and consequences do not matter, because it is in the design business, and so its primary relationship is with the user, not with the society.

And then there are things like the Data Liberation Front, AOSP, and the periodic table of open APIs. You can even run Android devices without Google, pretty much. Try using a new iPad without an Apple ID.

So until something better comes along, I’m going with Android for my phone and tablet needs. Freedom is too important. Google might not be perfect, but in the specific area of mobile platforms, they are a lot better than Apple.

Death of the Mac: The smoking gun

Some people are still convinced that OS X being jailed by default is not a sign of evil intent on Apple’s part. So here’s some more commentary around the topic.

“If Apple really wanted to restrict all app distribution to the app store, why did they come up with this Gatekeeper system?”

Because right now, there are a lot of applications that can’t be placed on the App Store because of Apple’s rules, as well as the technical restrictions such as sandboxing. There are even more applications whose authors are not interested in the App Store. I think the App Store has failed to get the critical mass Apple hoped for.

The ‘third way’ approach of “Well, you can get a key and sign your code but not actually have to use the App Store” is a way to entice everyone to sign their code with Apple-approved keys. Once all the major developers go along with that, the “Turn off Gatekeeper” option can be removed from OS X without 99% of users ever noticing.

At that point, Apple has complete control. They can set the terms for what software is allowed on the Mac, and yank apps even if they aren’t from the App Store. If they don’t want DVD rippers or emulators available, they just revoke the appropriate developer signing keys. And they can rent you developer access to your own hardware, like they do with the iPad and iPhone.

“You’re paranoid. Apple would never do that.”

If you don’t think Apple would ever do all these things, I have to ask: Why wouldn’t they? It would give them complete control over the platform, and the iPhone and iPad have apparently demonstrated that there would be no impact on sales from doing so. Even big names like Adobe and Microsoft have gone along with the iPad’s restrictions.

Compulsory signing would also eliminate the ability to run cracked pirated versions of applications. Developers would love that—and so would Apple, since they could start demanding a 30% cut.

You can see more of this cat-herding going on if you look at the new features in Lion and Mountain Lion. iCloud is only available to applications in the Mac App Store. The new notification center is the same. There’s really no technical reason for such restrictions; it’s just Apple using new functionality as a carrot to get everyone onto the App Store where they can be controlled.

“It’s just being done for the sake of security.”

You could just about make the argument that iSync needed to be limited for security reasons, but there’s no such excuse for apparent limitations on notification center access. To me, this is the smoking gun that shows Apple’s intent.

If Apple were really concerned with security, they’d be updating the out-of-date GPL software that ships with OS X to current versions that have had the security holes patched. But instead, they are purging all the GPL v3 licensed software.

The two big features of GPL v3 are disallowing use of patent lawsuits to prevent people using the code you distribute, and preventing locking down hardware so you can’t run modified code. The idea that Apple wants to be able to sue people who run GCC or the bash shell is possible, but it seems unlikely to me. Similarly, wanting to share code between iOS and OS X doesn’t really explain why they won’t distribute things like the bash shell and GCC which only exist in OS X. So that leaves locking down OS X as the most plausible motivation.

If Gatekeeper is all about security and not about control, why don’t Apple offer the same options as Gatekeeper on the iPad and/or iPhone? If Apple do that, I’ll admit I’m being paranoid and shut up about this. (And buy an iPad.) Since I submitted a request for a developer option to turn off the jail when the iPhone was launched, I’m not holding my breath.

On the contrary, unless Apple reverses their current course and opens up the new OS X functionality to all applications and not just jailed ones they get a 30% cut from, my current Mac will be my last.

Macintosh RIP: 1984–2012

OS X is now no longer Mac OS X. The Mac is dead.

Meanwhile, the next release of OS X will, by default, refuse to allow unsigned code to run. As I predicted, Lion was the last unlocked OS X, and OS X Mountain Lion ships jailed, like iOS. And good luck selling your software if it requires turning off the ‘security’ of GateKeeper; never mind that the OS X malware threat is practically nonexistent.

For now Apple gives you a way to jailbreak your Mac for free, but I expect that option to disappear with the next release. You’ll pay an annual developer fee and submit your code-signing keys to Apple, and in return you’ll get shell access and the ability to run your own code on your own computer. It’ll be just like iPhone and iPad, where you pay $99 a year to be able to run your own code on ‘your’ device.

And as people on Google+ have pointed out, it won’t be long before the corporate interests start politely asking Apple to revoke developer keys.

That emulator you like playing games on? Oh, sorry, Nintendo and Atari asked Apple and they disabled it. Your copy of VLC? Oh, sorry, the MAFIAA threatened Apple with a lawsuit for enabling playback of pirate movies, so it was disabled. Your DVD ripping software? What, you need to ask?

So I guess I’m moving to Linux. I’m sure there will still be people content to live in denial about how this is going to go, but I’m not one of them.

I started using the Mac in 1986. Bought my first Mac in 1990. So I’d just like to repeat a big ‘fuck you’ to all the lemmings who bought locked-down iPhones and iPads, and convinced Apple they could get away with this.

Apple’s great GPL purge

Apple obligingly allows you to browse and download the open source software they use in OS X. Since they have listings for each version of OS X, I decided to take a look at how much software they were using that was only available under the GNU public license. The results are illuminating:

  • 10.5: 47 GPL-licensed packages.
  • 10.6: 44 GPL-licensed packages.
  • 10.7: 29 GPL-licensed packages.

This clearly supports the idea that Apple is aggressively trying to remove all GPL-licensed software from OS X. While the removal of Samba and GCC got some attention, the numbers show that there’s a more general purging going on.

The 29 remaining GPL-licensed packages aren’t too healthy either. Lion apparently ships with bash 3.2. That’s from 2006. The current version is 4.2.10. Why no upgrade? Because Apple’s shipping the last version of bash that was under the GPL version 2.

The message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?

There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.

So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

Wake up, Android device manufacturers

Apple’s Q4 results were its best ever. They even managed to claw back some marketshare from Android. This should be a loud wakeup call for Android device manufacturers. I’ve been an Android user for a couple of years now, but let me say that there are some areas where Apple wins hands down.

Choice

Too much choice is a bad thing. I like that Android has phones with and without keyboards, phones in a variety of sizes, and so on. Unfortunately, HTC, Motorola and Samsung seem to crap out a new phone every couple of months, most of them indistinguishable from each other.

HTC Amaze, Wildfire S, Sensation, MyTouch 4G, Evo 3D, Evo Design? They’re all keyboardless. Apart from one of them being 3G, I’d be hard pressed to decide between them, or even tell them apart in the store.

And yet, the amount of real choice is less than ever. The phone I want is nowhere to be found (see end of posting).

Support

If you get an iPhone, you know there will be OS updates for a couple of years. In contrast, Android handset vendors have screwed over customers so many times that I won’t buy a phone unless I know for sure it’s supported by CyanogenMod. People who don’t care about freedom so much will just take the easy option and buy an iPhone. Trust matters deeply when you’re not technically minded.

I want to buy a tablet. Right now, I’m waiting, because I don’t trust any of the vendors to actually ship Android 4 for their tablets in a timely fashion, even if they’ve promised that it’ll be here in weeks. (I learned that lesson from HTC with my phone.) Again, people who don’t care about freedom so much will buy an iPad, because at least they can trust that Apple will ship OS updates for a year or two.

Experience

Part of the reason why manufacturers say they have trouble shipping OS updates, is that they all insist on layering extra crap on top of Android. But that’s not the only reason to dislike the value-subtract which handset makers keep applying.

My phone used to have HTC Sense. Installing CyanogenMod was the best thing I ever did to it. Suddenly the address book worked properly and I could star favorite contacts. The launcher lost the horrible bubbles around the icons. The useless social stream app and the voice search that never worked were gone, and the phone search button did something useful again.

I went to T-Mobile to look at phones. The HTC ones still have Sense UI crap all over them, and it’s still ugly. I don’t want it. And if you’re one of the people who does want it, there’s nothing to stop HTC from offering it as an optional add-on exclusive to their phones, without forcing it on people.

Motorola have claimed that the carriers are forcing them to layer UI crap on top of Android, because otherwise they’d end up with a half dozen identical Android phones on their shelves. Well, yes, see “Choice” above. Screwing up the UI so your multiple identical phones will look different is solving the wrong problem.

My perfect phone

OK, so support and experience suck, but at least we have choices, right? Well, it doesn’t seem that way to me. Here’s what I want from a phone:

  • A good camera.
  • A microSD slot for music, so I can replace my aging iPod.
  • A hardware keyboard.
  • Stock Android 4.x.
  • GSM compatible with T-Mobile.

So many Android phones out there, and yet precisely zero of them seem to meet my fairly mundane requirements, even if you relax the demand for Android 4. In fact, right now T-Mobile has no stock Android phones at all. Yet it wasn’t too long ago that they were selling the HTC G2, a stock Android phone with keyboard.

Something is very wrong here, and unless Google and the phone manufacturers can do something about it, the iPhone might get back the position of #1 smartphone platform.

Unsavery

You may be familiar with SnowSaver and RedPill, two popular Mac screensavers I wrote.

I recently signed up as a Mac developer, with the intention of making my screensavers available on the App Store.

After some technical hurdles, I submitted my first screensaver, and it was rejected on the grounds that it didn’t provide enough functionality to be worthy of the App Store, because it was just a screensaver.

I appealed the rejection, pointing out that there are already screensavers on the App Store. I got to speak to someone at Apple, who told me that the appeal board’s final decision is that the rejection stands. So going forward, no screensavers will be allowed on the App Store.

I post this information in the hope that it will save other people from wasting their time and/or money. Since the policy had invalidated my only reason for signing up, in my case Apple made an exception, canceled my developer account at my request, and refunded the membership fee.

Obviously it’s up to Apple what criteria they want to set for entry in the Mac App Store, as (for the moment at least) there are plenty of other places to distribute Mac software. I can’t help but be disappointed, though. I plan to focus my spare time programming back towards open source projects and Android.