Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [87]
And again, the same criticisms were leveled with the release of the iPhone, which was initially closed to outside software developers. The iPhone ran a handful of applications from Apple and Google—Google Maps, iPhoto, iCal—but was not open to third-party developers.
The hunger for developers to get their programs on the device was evident from the start. Within days of its release, the iPhone had been opened up by enterprising hackers, allowing owners to upload applications to the phone. Within weeks, more than two hundred applications had been developed for the iPhone, including clever location finders and innovative games.
But the application hack depended on a security weakness, which Apple quickly closed with a software update. The update also closed holes that had allowed some iPhone owners—in fact, quite a lot of them—to “unlock” their phones from AT&T’s network and use them with other wireless providers. (Apple revealed that as many as 25,000 iPhones hadn’t been registered with AT&T, suggesting that nearly one in six phones sold were being used with other providers, many likely overseas.)
The update disabled some iPhones, in particular ones that had been hacked. This appears to be unintentional on Apple’s part, but the “bricking” of so many devices turned into a PR nightmare. For many commentators, customers, and bloggers, it was Apple at its worst: treating early adopters and loyal customers like dirt, disabling their devices because they had the temerity to mess with them.
The developer community also reacted with shock and outrage, accusing Apple of blowing an opportunity to get an early lead on rivals like Microsoft, Google, Nokia, and Symbian in the smartphone market. To assuage the outrage, Apple announced a plan to open up the iPhone to third-party developers in February 2008 with a software developer’s kit.
Controlling the Whole Widget
Jobs’s desire to control the whole widget is both philosophical and practical. It’s not just control for control’s sake. Jobs wants to make complex devices like computers and smartphones into truly mass-market products, and to do that, he believes that Apple needs to wrest control of the devices partly from the consumer. The iPod is a good example. The complexities of managing an MP3 player are hidden from the consumer by having iTunes software and the iTunes store manage the experience.
No, consumers can’t buy tunes from any online store they like, but then the iPod doesn’t freeze up when music is transferred onto it. This is the practical aspect. The tight integration of hardware and software makes for a more manageable, predictable system. A closed system limits choice, but it is more stable and more reliable. An open system is far more fragile and unreliable—this is the price of freedom.
Jobs’s desire to build closed systems can be traced all the way back to the original Mac. In the early days of the PC, computers were notoriously unreliable. They were prone to constant crashes, freezes, and reboots. Users were just as likely to lose hours of work on a document as they were to successfully print it. This was as true of Apple’s computers as it was of computers from IBM, Compaq, or Dell.
One of the biggest problems was expansion slots, which allowed owners to upgrade and expand their machines with extra hardware like new graphics cards, networking boards, and fax/ modems. The slots were popular with businesses and electronics hobbyists, who expected to be able to customize their machines. For many of these customers, that was the point: they wanted computers that could easily be hacked for their purposes. But these expansion slots also made early computers notoriously unstable. The problem was that each piece of add-on hardware needed its own driver software to make it work with the computer’s operating system.