Good post. I've never quite figured out how "users shouldn't have to mess with their devices to get them to work" became conflated with "users shouldn't be allowed to mess with their devices". Especially when the company most responsible for that idea produced Mac OS X, which is widely praised by both technical and nontechnical users.
OMG sign up for the developer program and calm down. Or buy a zenPad. Or both.
Only people who have written assembly code for an embedded system, or installed an open source OS on a mobile device should even be allowed to make these "everything should be open" comments. The capability for you to tinker has been around for years, and in that time what have people created? Apparently nothing as good as Apple's closed system.
Don’t misunderstand: I don’t think it’s a real problem that I can’t change the capacitors in my television today — I think that the most interesting surfaces for tinkering tend to evolve over time — and today the primary tinkering substrate appears to me to be the open web.
This is so true. Growing up, what I remember most was playing with web tech - buying my own server space, hosting my own sites, installing random stuff like Wordpress and Drupal and messing with the code running these sites; learning CSS, HTML and doing random stuff in PHP ...
So what if we've lost the ability to mess with TVs, and computers, and iPads? It may very well be that the TV/computer/Heathkit equivalents today are Wordpress/Rails/Opentape installations, that kids run on their servers and play around with. We may not have another Apple on our hands (which resulted from arguably the king of tinkerers himself, Wozniak) but we might have the next Larry Page/Sergey Brin/Mark Zuckerberg.
Especially as the TV / Computer / whatever electronic hacking crowd still exists, and creating things from scratch has become insanely easier thanks to things like the Arduino.
Though the average consumer product is definitely less hackable now than it used to be, mostly due to significantly increased complexity, the intentionally-hackable world has if anything improved, and lowered the barrier of entry to the level where almost anyone can jump on within a day or so.
So what if we've lost the ability to mess with TVs, and computers, and iPads?
You can mess with TVs, but not many people do because there isn't much point due to the natural evolution of the technology. That's very different from the iPad, where there are lots of interesting things we could do, except that Apple has arbitrarily declared them to be illegal.
The article underestimates kids -- but the sentiment is understandable given the short history of computing. These guys witnessed the birth. Now things are vastly improved, just like how you open the hood of a car and it looks like an amorphous plastic object ("Back in my day, you could see how everything worked."). So while I enjoy the nostalgia, I suspect kids will be tinkering far into the future. That kids have the web to learn from is still amazing to me (I can't imagine programming without it) -- and it is itself a great platform for tinkering.
have you ever tried to fix a modern car? it's really not that hard. sure, you need a manual, and yeah, there are parts you can't fabricate with a good machine shop now, but it's still pretty accessible.
the thing is, compared to what you see in the computer industry these days (I'm given to understand this wasn't always the case) the manuals for fixing cars are /ridiculously good/
"Does the car start? if so, go to page 45, if not, go to page 2." etc... There's a word for it but I call it "choose your own adventure documentation" - It's quite effective, even an inexperienced mechanic can solve most problems when given the factory service manual. (I'm speaking of the factory service manual here, The much easier to obtain Chilton brand "Book of Lies" is considerably less useful, but still much better than most of what you get with a computer.)
Depends on the metric. If you have to pay 10 times the price for spare parts because the whole module has to be changed and the garage can't even repair anymore, that's hardly an improvement. I'm persuaded that ecologically the times of black boxes, when you change instead of repairing won't last that long. Perhaps I'm still too optimistic.
I want a handheld that is so easy to program that you can do real app development, right on the handheld itself. Not just toy app development, the real deal. It might not be as awesome as Eclipse or Xcode but if it's doable without an external host, kids will start playing with it.
The Newton could do this, 15 years ago.
From my limited knowledge only WebOS is close to being simple enough that you could reasonably develop for it without a "real" computer and all its baggage. Which is too bad, because it's a long ways from taking the world by storm.
the nokia n900 is essentially a full-scale Linux box; hell, it's a lot more powerful than the computer I had when I started learning Linux myself. the only handycap is the small monitor and keyboard; but it does have TV-out and bluetooth, so you can fix those parts yourself, if you like.
it's not any harder than any other linux platform; you just need to account for the small screensize (800x480 if I remember correctly)
The big win is that you can port existing linux apps targeted at other mobile platforms (or even desktop platforms, if you can make them work at 800x480) You also have a full linux stack for debugging on-device.
I think it'd be interesting to develop this way by dictation. Speech recognition should be relatively easy for programming languages where the rules are so simple, and typing isn't fun on a phone.
My understanding of the argument for the iPad is: we (technical guys/early adopters) don't want one, but it's not for us, it's for the mass market.
The diffusion of innovation is well studied. (Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_%28business%29)
If technical people don't buy something, no one else will. My geek friends bought an iPhone the second it came out. They won't buy an iPad.
So how do you convince the "early majority" that it's something worthwhile, something they should own, if you as an innovator or early adopter, don't want one. (Answer: you can't.)
I dunno about the part about it being inborn or not though - I had been taking things apart for as long as I can remember, and the fact that I was 'different' didn't not bother me AT ALL - until puberty.
