Apple, Android and a preference for "theft": Some thoughts on reading the Steve Jobs biography

A close friend bought me Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs for my birthday last year, and as I'm on holiday this week, I got around to reading it. As someone who's been a loud critic of Apple in the past, and someone who only owns one Apple product (an iPod Nano which I received as a freebie with an Android phone - ho ho), I was intrigued to see whether reading the biography would give me a more positive view of either the late Mr Jobs, or Apple.

I guess the main thing that the biography gave me is a more rounded appreciation of the huge contribution Steve Jobs made to the the computer and related hi-tech industries. Before reading it I knew what he'd done with Apple since becoming CEO in the late 1990s and also I knew the early history of Apple (from Robert X. Cringely's excellent book Accidental Empires), but I was pretty clueless about NeXT and had no idea at all that he had been CEO of Pixar as well. So here was a guy that was at the very least an interesting player, and for most of the time completely transformative, in his chosen field for thirty years. Not many people can say that.

So I have immense respect for Jobs the hi-tech entrepreneur and craftsman after reading the biography. However, I still won't be rushing out to buy Apple product any time soon. Why not? Well, to quote Steve Jobs's own words on what motivated him to start - and come back to - Apple,  when interviewed for the biography:

My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. Everything else was secondary. Sure, it was great to make a profit, because that was what allowed you to make great products. But the products, not the profits, were the motivation.

 And I'd agree that Apple makes great products - assuming you concur with its design philosophy (which is Steve Jobs's design philosophy), which involves accepting the following aspects of buying any Apple product:

• you will be paying a substantial premium over production costs (including R&D costs)
• you will be using the device in the way Apple thinks is most appropriate 
• the device will only work to its full potential when combined with other Apple devices which are also subject to the first two conditions above.

The problem for me is that - once these conditions are taken into account - Apple products are not as great as the competition. 

Take the iPad for example. The 16Gb iPad 3 costs about £400. I can get a decent 10" Android tablet running Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean for half that, or maybe even less. It will be more customisable, it won't be limited to running only those apps which Apple has decided are safe enough for me to use, and I won't have to use the accursed iTunes software (a program Charlie Brooker memorably described as a "binary turd" whenever I want to upload an MP3 to the tablet. 

With laptops, the price contrast is even more acute. You can get a great Windows 7 laptop from Samsung for around £500. A comparable MacBook will probably cost you twice that. There's a reason Apple is the most highly valued company in the world; because it's a cash cow. Every time someone buys an Apple product they are engaging in a subsidy of several hundred dollars to Apple's shareholders. A kind of philanthropy, I guess. But a strange one. 

At the end of the day, I'd rather make my own decisions on how to use hardware and software, and what combination to use, than the ones Apple thinks are best for me. Steve Jobs's view on this was very clear. He thought his decisions on which products Apple chose to bring to market, and the  parameters under which they should operate, was right, because he was smarter than the consumer.  It's a view of the world that can best be described as "conditional benign dictatorship". The Steve Jobs technological dictatorship is conditional because no-one's being forced to use Apple products. But, if they do decide to use Apple, then at that point Steve Jobs calls the shots. 

I very much doubt I'm as smart or as tasteful as Steve Jobs was, but I'm perhaps as arrogant as Steve was, and maybe that's why I think although Apple is a significant technological and ergonomic achievement, it sucks philosophically. And so I choose to stick with Android (for phones and tablets) and a combination of Windows and Linux (for PCs). Make no mistake: Windows was absolutely useless up until at least Windows 2000, and Vista was awful. But XP was pretty good, and Windows 7 is a very good OS indeed. Linux is also extremely impressive, totally customisable - perhaps the ultimate hacker OS. And I have fifteen years of experience with both of them, whereas I haven't used a Mac since 1995. 

With Android, there is an additional philosophical reason for me to want to use it. The Jobs biography is full of great quotes; the guy was one of the most quotable interviewees of the last 50 years. And he hated Android because it infringed Apple's intellectual property: 

Our lawsuit [against Android phone manufacturer HTC] is saying, "Google, you f***ing ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off." Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google's products - Android, Google Docs - are shit.

Strong words in anyone's terms. But now go back 30 years to the early 1980s when a team of Apple engineers were shown round Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) and saw the world's first Graphical User Interface with a bitmapped screen. In 1984, Apple launched MacIntosh; the first reasonably priced computer with a GUI and a bitmapped screen. At that point, the CEO of Xerox would have had just as much justification to tell Apple that "you wholesale ripped us off" as Jobs told Google 30 years later. The supreme irony is that Steve Jobs, a guy whose entire early career was based on "ripping off" other people's research, couldn't take it when Google did the same thing to Apple. He could dish it out but he couldn't take it. 

For the record, I don't see what Apple did in the early 1980s or what Google did with Android as "ripping anyone off"; rather, it's a healthy - perhaps essential - part of an innovative economic system. Copying other people's ideas in a cost-effective manner may be, in the end, a more important part of technological progress than having the ideas in the first place. And this means that the patent system is complete bullshit that should be abolished. (But that is a topic for another post). 

So in the end, I'm backing Android for phones/tablets on grounds of ideology as well as on cost grounds. At least, I am until somebody else rips them off and comes up with something better. 

RIP Steve Jobs. One of the true greats of the computer age. 

 

A tablet for (just after) Christmas

Over the last few months I've found myself strangely attracted to the idea of a tablet - not ibuprofen (although that has its pleasures), but the dinky little oversized phones with large touchscreens that are the biggest growth area in the computer market ever since Apple brought out the iPad almost 2 years ago. It's interesting, and largely unpredictable, what takes off and what doesn't in the computing world. Most of the pundits shared my initial opinion that the iPad would be a flop because at the end of the day, what was it? An oversized phone that doesn't make phone calls. But in fact, it was a huge success, on the back of very slick marketing, the excitement of the app store, and the integration with iPhones and Apple computers.

I haven't bought an iPad for several reasons, the main one being that I consider Apple kit somewhat overpriced for what you get - they are to computing what BMW is to cars, although I am pleased to report that Apple owners don't try to run you over in the same way BMW owners do. The iPad 2 is undoubtedly better value than the iPad 1 but there was still something about the £500 price point that didn't say "value" to me. £200 says value to me - I don't know why, but if there's a piece of kit that's less than £200 I am so there... if it's more than £200 I have to think carefully. This number is arbitrary and takes no account of inflation, but still... that's the way it is for me.

The other thing that pisses me off about Apple is the Stalinist approach to software and media management. I do have an iPod nano (2009 edition) because I got it free with an Android phone (hilarious irony!) One day I decided I'd like some MP3s on the iPod. It appears on my Windows PC as a USB hard drive, but can I copy across MP3s by drag and drop in Explorer the same way I can with any other MP3 player on the market? No, sir... I have to use iTunes which is the crappiest piece of software (at least on a PC) imaginable... Charlie Brooker called it a "binary turd" and that was being kind IMHO. Apple doesn't trust you to be able to get music on your device the way you want... you have to do it their way, or not at all. Similarly, Apps have to be approved by Apple before being placed on the App Store. This takes the free-for-all open approach which was the foundation of success for the internet and replaces it with a digital North Korea (I'm borrowing terminology from Van Patten here, but in this case the analogy is a good one). Contrast this with Google's Android platform where you can use any damn music player (and file format) you want and there is no central oversight to the application repository - anyone can get out there on the Android market. This probably means a higher percentage of shit applications but hey, I'm an intelligent consumer and I'll take my chances.

So why haven't I bought an Android tablet yet? Two reasons. One is that Android wasn't really tablet-ready until version 3.0 (Honeycomb) and Google reckon that it won't really be fully optimised for tablets until version 4. The other reason was the price of a good tablet. Any fool can sell you an el cheapo tablet held together with string for £150 or so, but the good stuff starts at about £330 with the Asus TF101 Transformer - and at that price point ol' tight wad comes into play again. It feels expensive and not at all an impulse buy. So again, at this point Android didn't feel quite ready for me - nor I for it.

What about other options? Until about 48 hours ago my response to that question would have been "ho ho ho", in the seasonal spirit. The main competition is RIM's Blackberry Playbook. At this point the tech-savvy among you will have fallen about laughing, so [in-joke alert] if your name is Foley let me return you to the floor by reminding you about the biology lab microscope.... :-) But Blackberry. Are you serious? The platform that gives you 72 hour outages because they didn't spend any money on infrastructure? An App Store less well populated than the Outer Hebrides? Hello?

Well, yes. Why? Two reasons, both the converse of why I rejected Apple and Android. One, cost. At its launch price of £400, the 16GB Playbook was really no better value than Apple, considering it is a 7-inch tablet rather than 10-inch. But PC World have now discounted it to £170 and at that price, in hardware terms, it's a steal. God bless underselling products.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, this is a "stealth" Android tablet. The Blackberry App Store remains woefully underpopulated (although RIM have released a utility for easy conversion of Android apps to Playbook apps which has helped a bit), but with version 2.0 of the Playbook OS (due in February 2012), there will be a built in launcher application allowing users to run Android apps on the Playbook! Furthermore, the tech-savvy among us can install the beta version of the 2.0 OS, root the Playbook, and - with some hacking about - install the Android Market on the Playbook, thus gaining access to (slmost) the full range of Android apps (subject to some library compatibility issues which will no doubt be sorted out down the line in any case).

An Android tablet with high build quality for £169? It's a reality. OK, if you believe the hype from the late great Steve Jobs that 7 inch tablets are crap then this won't be for you. But I don't - in fact, for me the iPad always looked a bit unwieldy. So rock on with the Playbook into 2012, kids.

Best iPad justification I have yet seen

I must say that I do love TV programme review sites, sad bastard that I am. A link on the currently rather inactive (but very good) Jammer's Reviews site took me to the AV Club which has years' worth of reading material on pretty much every US sci-fi TV show of the last 25 years or so.

I am a sucker for reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation (a rather Ed Miliband-sounding title in retrospect) Seasons 1 or 2, which were largely diabolical but with occasional glimpses of how good the programme would later become. it's pretty much always more fun reading reviews of something shit rather than a classic. I must try writing some reviews of Space: 1999 sometime (particularly the 'difficult' Season 2).

But that isn't the main point of this post, which arrives during a review of three mostly poor Season 1 episodes (the reviewer groups the episodes into threes at this stage, possibly because they're so bad he can't face tackling them individually). The comment that caught my attention is the best justification for an iPad (or indeed Android Tablet) I've yet seen:

I've read a ton of reviews of the iPad, and I understand the criticisms. It's beyond my price range right now, and I admit, I'm not sure I'd have a huge need for it even if I could afford it. But I want one because it's the closest we've come yet to the junk Geordi and Data and the others use on the Enterprise. I want Star Trek technology in my living room.

Amen to that. But why no market for phasers? (except in the guitar pedal fraternity...)