So you think Apple would like to close of OS X if it could?

And based on what you think, everyone else should avoid Apple?

You're just another rabid Apple hater, one of so many. You'd prefer not to wait for the crime before you give the sentence.

Here's a clue for you, since you're so obviously in need of intellectual assistance - what works in one market segment may not work in another. I'll expand on that a bit, to help you out. For appliances like the iPod, iPhone and iPad, a closed environment seems to make sense. It provides a single, focused place for users to buy media and applications, and minimises risk to users online. For a general purpose computer, a closed environment makes little sense, as the use that people will put it to cannot be easily predicted and therefore no single storefront for media, apps, web doodads, etc can work.

Now when that sinks through your mind, you may understand why your post is based on nothing more than your own delusions.

I swear half the accounts on /. these days were purchased recently from eBay. There's such a lack of clarity in posts, such a lack of thinking that it makes me wonder. Or was it always this bad and I never noticed?

Sopssa, that's a pack of lies and you know it.

Darwin is open sourced. You can download it, compile it, hack it and replace the kernel of OS X with your own.

The UI layers are closed, but the kernel is as open as anything.

Please stop the trolling and the lies. They're trivially easy to spot.

More trolling from sopssa.

Where is this device advertised as a general purpose computer?

It's meant to be an appliance. That's what it's advertised as. You can use it for all kinds of stuff, but it's meant to be an information appliance.

If Microsoft did this... wait - the XBox 360 is closed, the Zune is closed... so yes, Microsoft has done this. And you know what? No-one minded because those things are appliances and not meant as general purpose computers.

Is there some massive blind spot with Slashdot on this one? Anyone who posts against the iPad, no matter how logically flawed their post, is being modded up lately. Is this the backlash against Apple, as mindless as the unthinking support for Apple in the past?

Who says the market is always right?

I'm saying that in this case, you have a choice.

Use it.

Don't go around telling others why they should no exercise their own freedom to choose. Don't tell people that they're wrong for making a choice.

Jobs overseas? Is this even related to the point? If you're bemoaning international trade, then perhaps your issue applies to every single piece of computer hardware you own, or see in stores.

That battle was fought and lost by the "jobs for crowd." They lost hopelessly a few decades ago, and that's a good thing for the world, if not your specific job sector in your specific country (but then who bemoans the buggy whip manufacturers these days, eh?). Now your only hope is through intellectual power, so good luck with that education system over there in your country. (That applies to a lot of countries, although I'll guess you're in the US, so I wish you extra luck.)

Getting back to the point, the market may not always be right, and, but the wringing of hands on /. is verging on pathetic. Just don't support the products you don't like.

It's that easy.

Come on, you could've used a bad car analogy there instead of a ridiculous football analogy.

Another missed opportunity.

There's no such thing as a mobile market that includes the iPod, iPhone and iPad - they're three different devices suited for different purposes. You may as well throw in laptops. Hell, where are the transistor radios and bicycles?

What is this mobile market you're defining? It seems like "Apple's mobile products that aren't a Mac." That's right up there with that weird "Apple has a monopoly on Apple products" meme that people keep throwing up.

And yes, I can easily deny that Apple are the major player in the mobile device space. For music players, they're pretty huge, but I'd say that Nokia is the major player in the phone space. Even in the music player space, phones are huge - I see a lot of people these days with phones loaded with music, and the number of white headphones is significant, but not staggering.

Interesting times are ahead for all, and Apple will be targeted as a big fish, but it's far from the biggest fish in the mobile phone pond. It's a significant, and very high profile player, but not the majority by a long shot.

Opera may target Apple, but their success against Microsoft is no precedent in a case against Apple. Different worlds entirely - Windows is open to all comers, so anti-competitive practices are a real problem. The iPhone is open to only apps that Apple approves, so it's going to be very hard to establish a case that argues Opera did not realise this (when it's in print on a document they agreed to).

I disagree with your points, but time will tell who's right on this. Either way, it'll be interesting to watch.

Right now they're actually managing to make Microsoft look only moderately evil.... at least Microsoft lets you run arbitrary software on Windows.

So you equate the iPhone development environment with Windows?

You don't think that OS X would be a better match?

No, that'd ruin your ridiculous point by showing up the obvious error for all to see.

Apple may not be the most inventive company on Earth, but they're streets ahead of most in the tech world for usability. What irks me are the trolls (like you) who post bizarre claims (like yours) and are modded up by people who miss the massive logical flaws. You would do better to stick to real problems with Apple - of which there are plenty (hardware issues with many of their first-gen Macs, the stupidity of the opaque app approval process, etc) - instead of posts that expose your poor logical ability.

It's receiving mostly positive reviews so far, so those people lining up for one are not entirely foolish.

Some are getting in on the ground floor with developing for something new and exciting. For them, it's a smart move.

That sword, it has three edges.

From where I sit, a kid given an iPad (presumably by very well-off parents) has massive room for exploration.

But then I'm sitting in front of a Mac at the moment, and my choice of computer allows for more tinkering with this particular device.

If you've chosen differently, well, too bad for you. Perhaps you should look at your choices more carefully next time.

If you believe that devices should not be closed, then please go and buy the more open competing products. If enough people care, the iPad will fail and the market will shift in the direction you prefer.

My favourite part of this whole iPad thing is that everyone writes off Apple as a marketing company first and foremost. As indeed most of the replies to the parent post are doing.

It's great to watch so many technically-aware, relatively intelligent people fail so utterly to see the point. It's blindingly obvious, and yet they persist in their failure.

Even more fun is to see competing companies believe this stupidity and then try to out-market Apple (which is easily done) or try to 'out-feature' Apple (again, easily done). The products turn out to be pieces of crap when a user tries to make them work, but the boxes look great!

The iPod and the iPhone are great devices because of their interfaces and the trivial way a user can hook into the add-ons (songs, apps, movies, etc). You give them to a child, and within seconds the kid is using the device to do something. I've seen this happen a number of times. The devices are easy to use and have fluid interfaces.

When people talk about marketing, they are destined to fail. They will fail to compete because better marketing does zero for your interface.

The best indicator of an Apple product's potential in the general populace is how much the Slashdot crowd hate it. The iPod was roundly criticised, and proceeded to destroy utterly the mp3 player market. The iPhone was roundly criticised, and proceeded to change the way 'smartphones' work (finally - they're becoming useful!). The iPad is being roundly criticised, so I'm looking forward to seeing yet another Slashdot "failure to see the obvious" moment when it succeeds.

Punters will say it's because the average user is stupid (as though /. commenters are polymaths) but it's really because the average users are smarter in their use of time than most /. posters. Screwing around with gadgets is a waste of their time, so something that works fine, looks good, is priced okay and is easy to learn is going to win them over.

Yup, you really do fail hard.

Apple and Microsoft fail at innovation?

Well, I'm pretty sure that they've both taken their respective OSs a long, long way from the fairly humble beginnings.

You know what the process for those improvements can be called?

Innovation.

It doesn't have to be extreme, change the world stuff. Incremental improvements can be innovative.

As for Apple not participating in open standards - have you not heard of WebKit? Do you not understand their push away from Flash towards HTML5? Have you ever looked at a file saved by an Apple app (hint - it's a gzipped set of simple, open files)? Do you know what the iTunes database is (hint - it's XML)?

You're a troll, and not a very bright one. I'm sorry for you, that you fail to understand the world around you. Simple ignorance can be cured, but your wilful ignorance is tragic. Earlier you admitted to having trouble working an iPhone, the single easiest phone most people have ever used. It may not have every feature they want (and thankfully, no-one is forcing them to buy it) but I've never before heard anyone claim it was hard to work out.

You're just not suited to technology. Leave it to those of us who care, please.

It's the modus operandi of the troll - miss the first sentence in your post and invent a straw man for the rest.

If his post weren't so mired in stupidity, it'd be sad.

Remember, this is the bozo who couldn't manage to make a call on an iPhone, something children find trivial. His opinion can't be counted upon for anything. He clearly is unable to use basic technology. I can't imagine how he could have posted a comment on /.

Honest question - is it really worth their time (and costs) to write open-sourced drivers for Linux?

Has anyone quantified the sales to show that Linux is a worthwhile market segment?

WebKit ships in the box that says "OS X" on it.

True, but I thought the point being made was that WebKit affects more than just Safari. Isn't it the core of Firefox these days? And others?

Do you believe that security would be better if applications were coded in assembly, rather than higher-level languages?

I can't see why assembly language makes any difference to coding standards and practices. You can screw up in assembly just as easily as C++, and generally assembly is harder to debug.