<story><title>How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac</title><url>http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/27/how-a-great-product-can-be-bad-news-apple-ipad-and-the-closed-mac/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coffeemug</author><text>My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos, look at photos of their kids/grandkids, send e-mails to their relatives oversees, and read their favorite books on it, all without the need for a &quot;computer-savvy guy&quot; who has to teach them how it works, and fix it when it&apos;s broken. In other words, it&apos;s a logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution. I understand you need to run your Ruby scripts, but this product was designed for the 99% of the people in this country instead. You&apos;re not the target audience.</text></item><item><author>zacharypinter</author><text>This post adequately sums up my concerns.&lt;p&gt;Here we have a device that doesn&apos;t support USB thumbdrives, doesn&apos;t support dropbox (at least system-wide, I assume the dropbox iphone app would work), is unable to run ruby or any of my other dev scripts/tools, cannot install firefox or firefox plugins, etc.&lt;p&gt;I do not want to see computing head this direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lambda</author><text>The thing is, without an open platform, the new, innovative ways of working with this machine will never be invented.&lt;p&gt;This is about far more than running your own Ruby scripts. It&apos;s about the fact that true innovation cannot exist in such an environment. And the problem is, you will not see what you&apos;re missing; people won&apos;t bother developing new technologies that have no platform they can legally run on.&lt;p&gt;Would the Web exist if Microsoft had been able to ban Netscape from running on Windows? What new, groundbreaking technologies are we missing out on because it&apos;s not worth the time and effort to create something new if the platform vendor can simply forbid you from publishing it?</text></comment>
<story><title>How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac</title><url>http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/27/how-a-great-product-can-be-bad-news-apple-ipad-and-the-closed-mac/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>coffeemug</author><text>My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos, look at photos of their kids/grandkids, send e-mails to their relatives oversees, and read their favorite books on it, all without the need for a &quot;computer-savvy guy&quot; who has to teach them how it works, and fix it when it&apos;s broken. In other words, it&apos;s a logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution. I understand you need to run your Ruby scripts, but this product was designed for the 99% of the people in this country instead. You&apos;re not the target audience.</text></item><item><author>zacharypinter</author><text>This post adequately sums up my concerns.&lt;p&gt;Here we have a device that doesn&apos;t support USB thumbdrives, doesn&apos;t support dropbox (at least system-wide, I assume the dropbox iphone app would work), is unable to run ruby or any of my other dev scripts/tools, cannot install firefox or firefox plugins, etc.&lt;p&gt;I do not want to see computing head this direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jwhitlark</author><text>The logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution is the person doesn&apos;t control their device?!  That&apos;s not revolutionary; that&apos;s a return to the bad old days...</text></comment>