Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [88]
In 1984, Jobs and the Mac development team decided they would try to bring an end to the crashes and freezes. They decided that the Mac wouldn’t have expansion slots. If it couldn’t be expanded, it wouldn’t suffer from these driver conflicts. To make sure there was no tinkering, the case was locked shut with proprietary screws that couldn’t be loosened with an ordinary screwdriver.
Critics saw this as a clear indication of Jobs’s control-freak tendencies. Not only was his machine unexpandable, he physically locked it shut. Jobs had boasted of his desire for the Mac to be the “perfect machine,” and here he was ensuring it. The Mac’s perfection would survive even after it was shipped to users. It was locked shut to protect them from themselves: they wouldn’t be able to ruin it.
But the idea wasn’t to punish users; it was to make the Mac more stable and less buggy, and to enable programs to be integrated with each other. “The goal of keeping the system closed had to do with ending the chaos that had existed on the earlier machines,” said Daniel Kottke, a teenage friend of Jobs’s and one of Apple’s first employees.3
Additionally, the lack of expansion slots allowed the hardware to be simplified and cheaper to manufacture. The Mac was already going to be an expensive machine; eliminating expansion cards would make it a little bit cheaper.
But it turned out to be a wrong decision at the dawn of the fast-moving PC industry. As Andy Hertzfeld, the whiz kid programmer on the original Mac development team, explained: “The biggest problem with the Macintosh hardware was pretty obvious, which was its limited expandability,” he wrote. “But the problem wasn’t really technical as much as philosophical, which was that we wanted to eliminate the inevitable complexity that was a consequence of hardware expandability, both for the user and the developer, by having every Macintosh be identical. It was a valid point of view, even somewhat courageous, but not very practical, because things were still changing too fast in the computer industry for it to work.”4
The Virtues of Control Freakery: Stability, Security, and Ease of Use
These days, most of Apple’s machines are expandable, especially those aimed at professional users. Computers at the high end of Apple’s range have several expansion slots. Thanks to new programming tools and certification programs, which require rigorous testing, software drivers are much better behaved on both Macs and Windows. And yet Macs enjoy a much better reputation for stability than Windows computers.
Modern Macs use much the same components as Windows PCs. The guts are almost identical, from the central Intel processor to the RAM. Same is true of the hard drives, video cards, PCI slots, and the chipsets for USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth. The internal components of most computers are interchangeable, whether they come from Dell, HP, or Apple. As a result, the computer business is a lot less incompatible than it used to be. Many peripherals like printers or webcams are compatible with both platforms. Microsoft’s Intellimouse plugs right into a Mac, and it works instantly and flawlessly.
The only real difference between the Mac and the PC is the operating system. Apple is the last company in the industry that still has control of its own software. Dell and HP license their operating systems from Microsoft. The problem is that Microsoft’s operating system must support hundreds—maybe thousands—of different hardware components, assembled in potentially millions of different ways. Apple has it much easier. Apple makes only two or three major lines of computer, most of which share common components. The Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook are all basically the same computer in different packages.
From this perspective, Windows is an extraordinary achievement