Jobs called it "bicycles for the mind".*

Back in the beginning there was lots of talk of "toasters" as an appliance every household has and even a child can use (to the point there was a famous screensaver of flying toasters).

The Mac 512, Plus, and SE were embodiments of this. (The Apple //c with LCD attachment and carry handle was an earlier attempt.) Note that all of those included portability as a feature, while the all-in-one Macs (not the Apple //c) emphasized usability by non-tech and non-tech job people. Their spiritual successor is the last 3 years of iPad Pro w/ magnetic magic keyboard/stand.

It's pretty clear there's only a relatively short period of time the hobby shop and hackers are "changing the world", while the real shift comes when "everyone" can access and leverage the new tech (like a toaster, or fluoride in water).

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* There's another subtle difference between "bicycles for the mind" and "a computer on every desk and in every home." One of those is vendor centric, the other is user outcome space.

I remember "Bicycles for the mind" well:

http://raganwald.com/assets/images/bicycle-jobs.jpeg

But as a metaphor, I don't think of a bicycle as an appliance. Mainstream bicycles are brutalist: The chain and gears are usually on display and user-serviceable. Parts like wheels, saddles, and handlebars are standardized in a way that allows users to mix and match components freely. In the days of steel frames you could make art bikes and trikes and all kinds of things from a bicycle.

The metaphor works well to describe a lever for the mind's own motive ability.

> Mainstream bicycles are brutalist: The chain and gears are usually on display and user-serviceable. Parts like wheels, saddles, and handlebars are standardized in a way that allows users to mix and match components freely

That's a matter of perspective. If I create a simple bike drawing in crayon, it has none of those things, but everyone knows what the drawing represents if they had it. Maintenance and extensibility concerns are incidental. Framing things to be attractive, was one of SJ's talents.

I wish they were more like an appliance. The fact that I constantly have to fiddle with the damn things is why I don't ride more. If they were more like modern cars or, indeed, iPads, that'd be ideal. Instead it's like "well, let's go discover what work I'll have to do on my bike before I can ride it...." Ugh. I do enough handy shit, I don't need a bicycle-maintenance hobby.

If you want a low-maintenance bike, may I suggest a commuter bike?

Hub gear, Marathon Plus tyres, don't store it outside, and just drop it into your local bike shop every ~2000 miles or so as the brake pads get worn out.

Pro-tip: I used to curse my bike: the chain fell off all the time, the gears slipped, the shifting was fiddly, the brakes were crap. Then I, by luck[1], stumbled on owning a more expensive mountain bike, and things stopped failing. Cheap bikes are crap.

[1]: I bought a mid-price mountain bike, nothing fancy, in the era before rear suspension was common. It got stolen within a year. I was part of my parents' grandfathered insurance plan that had unbelievably good coverage for bicycle theft. Insurance replaced the bike with one that had all the same features. Not price matching, matching checklist features. Number of gears, etc. It ended up having some extra features, too, because that was what was in the inventory. After that bike was also stolen within a year, they replaced that with one that had all the features that were in the second one. Plus disc brakes, plus many others, because nothing else fulfilled the checklist. The price of my bike more than doubled in two years. No, you can't get that insurance anymore.

> The fact that I constantly have to fiddle with the damn things is why I don't ride more.

Nothing turns more people away from riding bikes than entry-level bikes. Which is unfortunate. Yes, they're constantly needing work and adjustment and never quite shift or brake well.

It doesn't have to be that way though. Mid to top tier components are very reliable and work so much better, even when old. It makes a night and day difference in how pleasant it is to ride.

I think I'm kinda in the same place I was with computers, years ago: I've bought very-cheap, I've bought a notch or two above very-cheap, and I've seen both suck about equally, so it's damn hard to convince myself that the solution to my problem is spending more money. But it's probably true.

And I know it's not exactly fair but I can't stop comparing bikes to cars. The amount and preciousness of the materials, the level of stress, the complexity of construction, how long it can go before service, and so on, and damnit, I can't shake the feeling that 1% of the cost of a car should get a really reliable and near-zero-maintenance bike. But no, $200 won't do it. $300 probably won't, even. Not for a new bike, anyway.

> But no, $200 won't do it. $300 probably won't, even. Not for a new bike, anyway.

These days more like 5K to 10K+ unfortunately.

The trick is buying used. But for someone new to cycling, it's easy to get scammed into a bad deal when buying used, so that's not a great solution either.

If you're familiar enough with the components to evaluate them on a used bike, great deals can be had. My first mountain bike (which I still have) was a very expensive model when new (S-Works, which is the Specialized top of the line) that I got for cheap when it was 5-6 years old. It's almost 20 years old now and still everything works perfectly, buttery smooth shifting, etc.

I joke that modern devices with modern social media act more like a taxi for the mind.

Programming on an iPad? Forget it. Have you thought about doom scrolling instead?

> Programming on an iPad? Forget it. Have you thought about doom scrolling instead?

Current 13" iPad Pro beats original Macbook Airs for dev, plenty people used them.

I'd argue toolchains readily available on iPad Pro with real keyboard and trackpad today is better than any laptop any devs did work on two decades ago.

Of course if you use Blink (mosh) you can ssh to anything, you can run VSCode or GitHub Codespaces or Cloud9 or any web IDE, you can use any VDI ... even if you don't like the Git file sync and local native Code Editor tools that are compatible-ish with Codea / Textmate / Sublime flavors of editor.

I completely agree that the latest iPad Pro is a powerful device that can handle development tasks with ease, but I'd like to offer a few points of consideration:

1- While VDIs can be useful options for remote development, I have found that the user experience can be negatively affected by lag or other performance issues.

2- I would not consider Cloud9 to be a recommended solution, as it might be considered outdated compared to newer solutions.

3- While Codespaces could be an alternative solution, it does not offer the same level of security as other options like VDIs.

One alternative that I would suggest exploring is the use of secure containerized environments (CDEs), such as those offered by Strong Network (https://strong.network/). I work there myself, so I may be biased. But from my experience, these environments offer a more secure and stable environment for development work, without the potential lag and other issues that can come up with VDIs or other web-based IDEs.

Of course, the choice of tool ultimately depends on your specific needs and preferences. If you're looking for personal use, GitPod handles things very well. And if you prefer to stay within the GitHub ecosystem, then Codespaces may be the way to go.

Hope that helps!

1984: A bicycle for the mind

2010: Post-PC age. cURL? Why not curl up on a couch with your favourite movie instead?

> Jobs never lost his vision that Apple should sell appliances, and people who wanted to "wrench their own devices" should buy PCs.

And honestly, I don't think information appliances are a bad thing to have in the world. It's not the kind of device I would choose for myself, but there's a class of users for whom a general computing device isn't just overkill, it's downright dangerous.

Android is fine for my use case, and while there are specific policies I wish Apple would change, I don't begrudge them the philosophy.

> there's a class of users for whom a general computing device isn't just overkill, it's downright dangerous

I am not sure if you are trying to come off as snobby, but that's how this reads.

This 'class of users' is in many cases very technical people who just don't want their phone to be anything other than an appliance. It's quite common to love tinkering with things, while not wanting to tinker with everything.

No, I didn't mean it at all. I was thinking of my mother-in-law, who I'm very grateful uses an iPhone.

Highly technical people may choose an information appliance as well, and that's fine! All the more reason for such a thing to exist.

Consider the impact on living standards for a person [0] who is capable of transferring money without understanding the consequences, ex a child or a demented person.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/30/1152448758/an-older-persons-m...

Except Apple's walled garden doesn't protect you from financial scams.

Apple is more like a television manufacturer that only lets you watch Disney+. The extent to which they protect their walled garden is not for the benefit of the consumer.

But it's worse than appliance. Appliance doesn't actively block you from using it for something not listed in instruction manual

If you feel around the margins, you can find exceptions for everything. e.g. You can cook a fish in a dishwasher. But while anyone can modify a toaster to do wild things, they aren't designed to facilitate that and it isn't a mainstream thing to hack your toaster.

PCs are hackable by design. It's a perfectly mainstream thing to build your own PC from parts. Hacking toasters, on the other hand, is not mainstream. Best Buy sells toasters, but not parts for toasters.

I personally wouldnt draw the line between information appliances and computers at whether the manufacturer actively blocks you (as Apple and John Deere do), but rather at some combination of what the intended purpose is, and whether hacking and customization is considered mainstream or fringe.

Hacking toasters and dishwashers and microwaves and refrigerators is possible, but fringe. Hacking cars and houses is mainstream.

> It's a perfectly mainstream thing to build your own PC from parts.

Is it? Most PC (or notebook) users buy whichever one is on sale at the store, or they use one provided by their company. This does not strike me as inherently different to how people buy toasters or dishwashers.

Of course, there does exist a niche of people who like building their own PCs, but this does not imply that this is the mainstream case.

I think a better analogy for the toaster would be blocking people from heating their waffles or fish sticks in it. And Apple takes it even further than limiting it to bread, it's only meant for gluten-free slices from San Fransisco. Anything else and you void your warranty. Also the cord stops working every 2 years.

Not to really beat an analogy to death, but a better comparison is Keurig. Its a coffee machine that JustWorks (tm) precisely because it packages up all the "hard parts" in custom stuff. If you buy their pods, you can just toss it in and its good. If you want to use your own coffee.. you need a custom pod that can accept coffee grinds, you need to refill it every time, etc. If you want to make espresso with steamed milk.. you basically can't use a Keurig. No one can really sell Keurig pods without a license, and they used to actively try and keep you from using unlicensed pods.

I have an espresso machine, and you need to calibrate the pressure, the temperature, clean all the parts regularly (far more than a pod machine), you need to fill the coffee grinds in a way that is distributed so the water runs evenly, you need a coffee grinder that makes less-coarse grinds, etc... its far more work, but the coffee is exactly how I like it.

An appliance is engineered to serve a narrow set of purposes, which can also be said for iOS. The only way in which an iPhone is worse is that it is an information appliance built on hardware that could be general purpose if run with different software. But if you consider the appliance to be both hardware and software, it is no more restrictive than any other appliance.

The difference is that iPhone is intentionally restricted by Apple to not allow you to use it in unintended ways, which "incidentally" brings a lot of additional profit to the company.

Relevant (and worth reading, if you haven't seen it):

"Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow

At NeXT it seemed like Jobs did the opposite, making workstations for professionals.

Always felt that was because there were a few things he wanted in the machine, power, high storage, high resolution, multitasking, networking, voice recording and the only way to achieve those was a price tag that could only be sold as a workstation.

I am not in a position to say why the original NeXT was so different in philosophical underpinnings than the Mac, but there are a few differences one can observe from the outside that may (and I only say may) have contributed to the final outcome:

1. When Jobs left Apple, he was barred from competing with them in the general computing/appliance market. NeXT when it launched was advertised as a product for higher education.

2. Jobs had to bootstrap a company from scratch into what was by then a much more sophisticated industry than existed when the Apple // or mac were launched. Building on top of Unix and Mach was way lower risk than trying to invent an entire operating system from the ground up when your interest was really in the user experience.

That's because there wasn't any Linux back then. Apple has basically given up on enterprise offerings.

>But Jobs never lost his vision that Apple should sell appliances, and people who wanted to "wrench their own devices" should buy PCs.

You present an excellent historical case of how Apple got here, but here's where I see a dichotomy: Back in the day, tools like RezEdit, Hypercard, AppleScript came included. There were countless "apps" to reconfigure how the Mac looked and felt to create a personalized experience. Average users had developer-like tools that enabled them to become producers. Even today, things like Swift Playground send a message that Apple wants a technically-enabled user base.

Perhaps this is really an issue like centralized vs decentralized computing, states vs. federal, IE: there will always be a fundamental fight where some people within Apple want a black box appliance, and others want a fully customizable hackable device.

Speaking of HyperCard:

Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media. HyperCard used a metaphor of stacks of cards containing graphics, text, buttons, and links that could take you to another card. The HyperTalk scripting language implemented by Dan Winkler was a gentle introduction to event-based programming. Steve Jobs wanted me to leave Apple and join him at Next, but I chose to stay with Apple to finish HyperCard. Apple published HyperCard in 1987, six years before Mosaic, the first web browser.

—Bill Atkinson https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

My recollection of HyperCard is that it was a grassroots success, Apple did not invest in it, Apple never made a compiler to turn stacks into Mac apps, &c. I personally did two professional HyperCard stacks. One was an internal tool used by a consulting client. The other was a configuration tool for a very successful (at the time) Java development suite. I wrote it in a weekend to meet a deadline, which is why it was written in HyperCard and compiled to run on all our supported operating systems using a third-party compiler.

My employer was aghast at this, our mantra was that if we’re selling Java tools, wherever possible we would write them in Java. I thought I was a decent programmer at the time, but no way I could bang out a robust customer-facing tool in a weekend using Swing or AWT or whatever.

It was eventually rewritten in Java by a co-op student, it took their entire work term. So eventually, everyone was happy. But HyperCard got the job done when shipping fast mattered.

speed is important to you. I can tell because you abbreviated an abbreviation.

> &c

for those not in the know, "etc" is an abbreviation for "et cetera" which is Latin for "and so on."

the Ampersand character itself evolved from the shape of the word "et" which alone is "and" in Latin.

what do you do with all the time you save? :D

Others may not know the origin of &c., so it's great that you explained. But here's a thought: Abbreviations are not about saving time typing for me. Other reasons for abbreviations:

1. Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms are a kind of jargon that compress long words into single tokens that communicate something in a single chunk. That is more efficient for _readers_ to parse... If they are in the know.

2. Speaking of being in the know, abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms communicate which tribe you belong to, and this strengthens social bonds between writer and readers.

3. Some mediums have limited space available. Newspaper headlines, SMS messages, and the original Twitter tweets are examples of mediums with limited space. Abbreviations help compress longer messages to fit the medium.

I happen to be a very slow author compared to just about every professional I know. Since it takes me a while to think about what I write, I find that trying to find shortcuts is not helpful with code or the written word.

Cheers...

And these days, every Mac comes with a full Unix terminal built-in. Xcode is a free download (remember, if you wanted to develop Macintosh applications back in the day, you had to buy something like CodeWarrior!), and, as you say, they've developed Swift Playgrounds specifically to make a nicer onramp for people interested in developing their own stuff.

It's never been trivial to configure the Mac in terms of things like skinning, but third-party tools to do so have always existed for those who cared enough to look, and today, if you want to install Linux on your Mac, you can. If you want to install Windows on your Intel Mac, you can even do that. Those options were, at best, incredibly niche back in the pre-Intel days (though I remember toying with SuSE Linux for PowerPC in the early 2000s), and nearly nonexistent in the pre-MacOS X days.

So it's definitely not a simple case of "Apple in the '90s was in favor of customization; when Jobs came back, he locked them all down and made them toasters."

Even though its now probably 20+ years old, the CodeWarrior experience was vastly superior to XCode.

For a company with Apple's budget, XCode is a disgrace.

Oh maaaaaahn, do I remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior[1] fondly! Thank you for bringing it up. I also remember using Lightspeed C, which later became Think C.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C

Still got my Code Warrior tee shirt, showing a chunky dude holding a floppy disc...

Oh my god, I’ve been using Xcode to make something recently and holy moly it’s where energy and ambition goes to die. The sheer number of bugs in both Xcode and in apple’s APIs is astounding.

Constant crashes, unreliable and underdocumented apis. Urgh.

I’ve been doing web programming for the last decade or so. When I started web programming, it was a mess of browser incompatibilities and jquery. But now I’d take modern web development over apple’s hellscape any day. MDN, caniuse, flexbox & grid CSS, modern bundlers, svelte and solidjs - this stuff is a delight in comparison.

The ironic thing is that today, Codewarrior is just a crappy reskin of Eclipse for developing for NXP chips.

I’m fleshing out these thoughts more in a longer form - but I think Jobs was heading the company into the abyss with the appliance model.

If it weren’t for the AppStore, it would’ve been the end of Apple. The iPhone wasn’t released with it at the outset - because this “make your own” wasn’t a part of the ethos. The Mac also suffered tremendously with no love to Final Cut, snipping Aperture, and leaving the hardware to bit rot for the longest.

iPod was a hugely profitable windfall and iPhone was too - somehow the AppStore slipped in there and became the lone remaining ember that reignited the hacker mindset - Swift I believe is that true rekindling; everything else follows M series, OSX continuities, etc

I’m starting to rethink everything I thought I knew.

It’s difficult to square creating both the most successful product and the most successful company in history with the idea Jobs heading the company into the abyss with the appliance model.

I'm fine with saying "the abyss of rent-seeking" even when rent-seeking behavior by corporations makes them a lot of money.

AppleScript was a far more effective way of scripting your computer’s GUI apps than anything on a competing platform (even if AppleScript the language was terrible, Cocoa and Carbon made it incredibly easy for GUI apps to add AppleScript support) further strengthening the idea thst Apple was in favor of making macs programmable by the average user, even under Jobs. Heck, the AppleScript language was terrible precisely because it attempted to be approachable to regular users and resemble English.

The Apple Macintosh was released in 1984. Jobs was pushed completely out of the company in 1985. When did RezEdit, Hypercard and AppleScript come out? Without looking it up, I would say after Jobs left Apple.

ResEdit: May 85

Jobs resigns: September 85

HyperCard: August 87

AppleScript: October 93

Counterpoint:

NeXTStep: September 1989.

And then there's Automator: April 2005

https://support.apple.com/guide/automator/welcome/mac

Apple between 1999 and 2012 seemed to put out one banger after another. But I could smell the garbage coming with the original iPhone. It's funny because the iPhone is lovely ... until you get down to the many many desperate attempts at vendor lock-in, the "meh" quality software (NOT compared to Android software, just compared to well-written computer software), and the way everything's locked down. Mehhhhhhhh.

Yes, but MacBASIC was worked on under Jobs' leadership -- until it was taken at gunpoint by Bill Gates:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt

> The UX he designed was text-centric and used high-speed incremental search as its navigation paradigm.

That sounds exactly like emacs with company-mode or ido-mode.