I’m one of those people who think that without Steve Jobs Apple is fairly dull. Still a great company with great products and better than anyone else, but not insanely great as they were before. I mentioned that in my ‘Has Apple lost its crazy side?‘ article.
As far as the iPhone 5 is concerned, NFC is missing which for me is the next big thing. I’m sure that it would have been much more exciting if we’d known nothing about it before hand, but we knew everything they announced with all the leaks, so not exciting.
I admit that Apple and me are not as close as before. Now I actually take a step and look at it. I don’t just buy it because it’s Apple. Having said that, I do mostly buy Apple products as they are mostly superior.
Apple closing off Mac upgrades for example, I think is pretty terrible. But that also highlights my inherent fear, and links to what I said before about OS X/iOS. Apple are going from being completely open and user fixable to as closed as possible, which is pretty depressing. Having said that, it’s a business and it will allow them to make even more money.
I would also say that if OS X didn’t exist, and Apple were designing a brand new desktop operating system from nothing today, based on its business model, it would be closed with an App Store, like iOS is. It wouldn’t allow free app development and publishing with no Apple interference.
Of course, a closed environment comes with many advantages, like no viruses, and everything is controlled. That’s fine, but it’s all about compromises. It depends on who you are as well.
There’s no denying that Steve Jobs did oversee Apple becoming more closed, in fact he was the person who started it, but it’s odd. Certainly in the early 2000s he was open to people tinkering and upgrading parts on Macs, but he seems to have changed his mind more recently, with the Macbook Air. Don’t know why, but it’s interesting.
Certainly when Steve Wozniak was at Apple, everything was open. When he left, things became more controlled and limited, it has to be said. In that sense, I much prefer Woz’s approach to Steve Jobs’s.
One was keen to provide for the pleasure of doing it and being geeky, while the other had a business plan and greater ambitions. Jobs brought Apple to where it is today. You would be nuts to say otherwise, but it would be nice if some of Wozniak’s approach remained in the company today.
Those are some pretty disorganized thoughts, but I thought it might be interesting to put out. Of course this is my opinion and nothing more. Some of you might think I’m crazy or agree completely, but how do you think Apple has changed? Positively or negatively?
