On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 14:53, Ian Forrester <[email protected]> wrote:
> But tinkerers are a limited market; there are lots of people who like to soup > up their cars, but there are lots more who don't. If Apple is wise—and I'm > betting it is—it'll build a tablet for the large majority of people who just > want it to work. " > > This always urks me. Tinkerers? Is someone who puts fluffy dice in there car > a tinkerer or not? The person who chooses to add a CD changer or puts a roof > rack on top, a tinkerer? Apple was built on tinkerers, and now there closing > the door on the next generation. This does somewhat ignore the fact that, especially in Apple's darkest days, those who develop for the platform were its core customer base. WWDC is a major event in the Apple calendar. Nobody’s going to be running Xcode on an iPad any time soon; the needs of developers and hobbyists and so-called "tinkerers" will be served for a long time to come, not to mention the various “Pro” application scenarios which don't mesh well with the consumer-focussed UI of iPhone OS. The iPad is nowhere near the be-all and end-all of Apple's product strategy, but it is *a* part of it, and guns for a segment which nobody has any real success in capturing to date. I don't doubt that within 6 months there'll be a glut of competing devices which attempt to peg the trade-off between flexibility and usability at a different point along the line. There seems to be a lot of criticism, mostly in tech articles rather than individual discussions, that a device seemingly designed to cater for people who aren't particularly interested in computers appears to be a device for people who aren’t particularly interested in computers. I would refute the idea that Apple was built on tinkerers to an extent: it may have been true in the days of the Apple II, but it hasn't been since, really, at all (and during a big chunk of the 1990s, it wasn't clear *what* it was built on). M. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
