It was hot out. Our Macs weren’t quite able to cope. So we put ice packs on them.

Steve Jobs is a majestic beast, and I would like to shoot him with a blunderbuss.

He is a visionary and a genius, a rebel who lets nothing and no one stand in the way of his dream of the future. If only his vision of the future were less cynical.

There are counteless articles discussing fears that the iPad might mean the beginning of the end for the Mac. The near-universal “no” argument is that professionals will always need the power that Macs afford, versus iPads, which are primarily “content consumption devices.”

Exactly. Steve Jobs recently said that, “PCs [i.e. Macs] are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them.”. Obviously, as anyone in the US knows, the amount of people who own trucks is much higher than the amount of people who actually need them, but if our culture were sane, one could probably approximate that 1% of people would own trucks. This sounds an awful lot like the 1% rule: the assumption that only 1% of people actually create anything.

This is why it would make no sense for Apple (and by “Apple” I mean Steve Jobs, because seriously, who else at that company makes any actual decisions?) to kill the Mac. The 1% will buy Macs, and create “content” to be “consumed” by the 99% with iPads and iPhones, as envisioned by Jobs. Obviously, with the introduction of iOS apps such as iMovie, there will be some ability for those without a “creation device” to do something creative. But the limitations of such apps, and, for that matter, touchscreen interfaces themselves, mean that only in a small variety of cases will one be able to produce anything of professional quality on an iDevice. If you want a degree of control that’s necessary for professional quality, you’ll need a general purpose computer, such as a Mac.

Perhaps, to some degree, it’s always been this way. Creating something to show on a television has to be done with all sorts of professional equipment. The fact that everyone, for so many years, has owned a device which could be used for endless creativity has been by accident. Only 1% of people have leveraged the creative capabilities of their computers. Steve Jobs simply aims to remove the complexity of computers for those who don’t wish to create anything.

So, why is this cynical? Is it because Steve Jobs desires monopolistic control over the lives of creators and consumers alike? Is it because Steve Jobs believes he can tell people what they want, and that they just have to lie down and accept it? No, it is because Steve Jobs is building creative professionals an ivory tower. He chooses to reinforce the idea that only 1% of people create anything, instead of asking, “why?”

The answer, of course, is that creating things is really, really difficult. Not actually being creative, though. Anyone can come up with a great idea. But the execution of these great ideas is, to 99% of people, extraordinarily difficult.

There’s a different Steve who is asking that question, “why?”. Stephen Wolfram.

Wolfram is the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, a sort of plain-English calculator which can take, for example, the phrase “wind speed of Hurricane Katrina times stock price of Cisco” and actually give you a result. It’s interesting if not mind-blowing in its current form, but it’s only the beginning of Wolfram’s plans for the future. In an oddly downplayed remark near the 11:45 mark of a TED Conference talk, Wolfram describes how Wolfram|Alpha integrates with Mathematica, a complex computational programming language he created. Already, you can type “spiky” into Mathematica, and it will use Wolfram|Alpha to understand which complex shape you’re talking about.

But then, Wolfram speculates what might happen once this plain English technology gets even better: “It really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to just sort of say what they want in plain language, then…Wolfram|Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they’re asking for.”

That’s amazing in and of itself. Now replace “programming” with “computer-generated animation.”

Obviously, it’s going to be an extremely long time before I can give my artificial intelligence assistant a sci-fi movie script and have it render the whole thing in Avatar-level detail before my eyes. But at least Stephen Wolfram is working to bring us closer to a world like that. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, isn’t even trying to lower the barriers to creativity. He is taking the barrier between “amateur” and “professional” and electrifying it with 40,000 volts.

You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.

There. Now you know.

The iPad is the first device to use an Apple-designed processor. This is something one could easily have predicted when Apple bought PA Semi in 2008, but now that Apple’s finally gone and used their newly acquired chipmaker to actually make their own chip, the potential ramifications begin to sink in. Now that Apple makes their own processors, what’s to say they’ll still be putting Intel’s in their Macs?

One can see why they wouldn’t want to. Intel Macs are much better for Apple customers than Apple shareholders, because they A) allow people to install Windows or Linux on their Macs, and B) allow people to install Mac OS X on whatever the hell they want. Both are things that Apple would probably like to make more difficult or impossible.

But wasn’t installing Windows on a Mac one of the big features that Apple used to promote? Of course it was, five years ago; back then, it was entirely possible that the average user might still need some of their Windows apps. Well, okay, it probably wasn’t, but over the last five years, millions of people switched to Macs, more and more of what we need computers for has become web-based, and the amount of software for the Mac has grown exponentially. It’s more evident than ever that to the average user, OS X and Windows (and Linux) are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. There is nothing you can do with one OS that you can’t do with the other, and it all comes down to personal preference. Even I, a power-user, have no reason whatsoever to boot into Windows except for gaming, and the PC gaming market isn’t perceived as large enough for most companies (like, for example, game publishers) to care very much about.

Apple can drop its commitment to Windows-on-the-Mac at any time, and it would have no adverse effect on their business.

So what of the Hackintoshing issue? It’s not legal in most countries — much like torrenting copyrighted movies, going 70 mph on a 55 mph highway because everyone else is, or clicking the “I’m 18″ button on a porn site when you’re actually 17 — but that’s hardly stopping people from doing it. In fact, I’ve long been considering building some Hackintoshes; my Macbook Pro isn’t great for HD animation and video editing, and buying a Mac Pro and a few Xserves for rendering could be almost triple the cost of building equivalent machines. That kind of thing, I would bet, frightens Apple very much: independent filmmakers who will cost-cut as much as they can to get their projects done without blowing all their rent money.

It’s not that Apple wants to bankrupt millions of starving artists. It’s that they’re a publicly-traded corporation, and they have a duty to their shareholders to make the most money that they can. By ditching Intel processors for a proprietary chip, and eventually phasing out backwards-compatibility with Intel chips, Apple could make Hackintoshing virtually impossible.

So, Zacqary, basically what you’re saying is that you’re upset because maybe now you can’t illegally install OS X on a cheaper computer?

No, Helvetica Bold 10 Maroon, not exactly. I’m upset because Apple has gotten used to taking away their customers’ control over the computer-like-devices they purchase, and it’s not inconceivable to imagine them doing just that for Macs too.

Admittedly, building Macs with Apple processors wouldn’t necessarily change the Mac experience all that much; you just wouldn’t be able to run Windows on it anymore. But if they get away with that, what’s to say they’d stop there? Why not move OS X to a locked-down, App Store-ish model? Why not ban Adobe Premiere from OS X because it competes with Final Cut? Hell, why not ban Photoshop because with the amount of Apple vs. Adobe fighting there’s probably a Photoshop competitor being worked on by Apple right now?

But that would piss off the pros, right? Mere “consumers” might be dumb enough to take that lying down, but graphics and video professionals would never stand for such things. Surely Apple couldn’t do that, right?

Of course they can. They’re Apple. They can do whatever they want. And they seem to want to be in complete control of everything, from the moment it is sold until the moment it deteriorates due to planned obsolescence.

Obviously, it wouldn’t work, and Apple would completely fall apart as people begin to remember why openness was a good thing. That doesn’t mean they won’t try. And that very real possibility that Apple might pull this crap is making me very interested in Linux-based alternatives to the Final Cut suite.

Lately I’ve noticed that some developers are avoiding building apps and, instead, are building custom web pages that are designed specifically for the iPhone. [...] Yesterday another one came along from Nextstop, which is a cool new app for sharing cool things to do near you (great for travelers to check out) and they, too, decided on HTML5 instead of doing an iPhone app.

Some reasons Nextstop likes HTML5:

1. Rapid iteration. If they code a new feature tonight, you get it tonight. No waiting three weeks for you to get their latest.
2. It prepares their systems for building a native app. Why? Because apps can include a Safari browser instance inside, so all of this work is reusable, even if they do a native app.
3. It’s easier to build and debug because you don’t need to do a lot of specialized coding to make the native app work properly.
4. It fits into the greater web easier for users. In an iPhone app it can be jarring to take users out to a web browser, but if they already are in the browser they are used to going to other pages and back again using Safari’s navigation.

That sounds like a really great idea, doesn’t it. You know who else thought so? Steve Jobs:

WWDC 2007, SAN FRANCISCO—June 11, 2007—Apple® today announced that its revolutionary iPhone™ will run applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards when it begins shipping on June 29. Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps.

But then the developers were all like, “Nooooooooo!” and Apple was all like, “Fiiiiine!” in October 2007 and announced a way to build native apps. But submitting an app to the App Store and going through the approval process is annoying as hell for developers, so they’re getting around that by doing what Apple wanted them to do anyway in the first place.

That Steve Jobs sure is a crafty one.

China limits people’s freedoms and rights, exhibits harsh and total control, keeps a tremendous amount of its operations secret, and yet makes a ridiculous amount of money. Who else does that make you think of, hmm?

The only difference is that Apple actually designs good products. Oh snap, China.

PreThinking added their logo to the image, as is common practice in the interblogosphernetwebs, where anyone can take your image and claim it as theirs unless you put some form of identifier on it. For what this man did, the phrase “pre-thinking” is coincidentally appropriate.

[PreThinking via Gizmodo]

(Original post, which you shouldn’t look at because Failblog’s 3235875 comments per post is browser-crashing)

You people are crazy. There is no way Apple would announce a new Mac Mini with that few USB ports.

I happen to have gotten from an anonymous source today a leaked ad for the next Mac Mini. It appears to have a much more logical amount: 70 USB ports.

It’s a bit larger than the past generations, but at least you can finally connect a freaking keyboard and 69-pack of mice. Come on, that’s essential.

But yesterday Apple apparently did approve something called Wobble. It’s an application that allows you to add “wobble regions” to photographs. These regions will jiggle when you shake your iPhone. (Hint: You put them on boobies!!!!)

Seems Apple’s being their hypocritical selves again. After the jump, videos explaining why…

Here’s iBoobs. I don’t find it particularly entertaining myself, but the demo video shows that it’s hardly offensive or pornographic:

Contrast this with Wobble. Observe:

The use of actual boobies, to me, seems more pornographic than the use of fake ones. But there are two possible arguments in Apple’s favor here:
- Wobble, while obviously intended to make boobs jiggle, doesn’t come preloaded with any
- Apple does not condone the practice of ogling over fake tits because women shouldn’t feel the need to get implants or something

Either way, iPhone users have made a purchase, not a rental or lease or whatever, from Apple, and should therefore be allowed to put whatever they damn please onto it regardless of whether Apple likes it. But still, jiggle physics are always funny, especially when they create controversy.

[Source: Gizmodo]