Hardware is Apple's real business, and I think that controlling which software runs on it should not be a part of their business model.
Doesn't seem like Apple needs too much help with their business model. Or is your "should" intended to connote an ethical, rather than financial, obligation?
Be real for once!
"Controlling" most assuredly implies an ethical issue.
User Experience is Apple's business, not hardware, and I think "make it just work" is a design philosophy whose success is largely responsible for the company's ascendancy.
No! Hardware is Apple's business, and "It Just Works" is as you say, but "User Experience" is more appropriately tied to the interaction between Macs, "i" devices, and the world as Steve Jobs envisions it...a (so to speak) come-lately.
And I never suggested that there's anything wrong with "It Just Works" other than that Apple's current position is that just because Apple thinks it works and is good for you you don't need a means to undo the "good" even if you think it's bad.
In another thread, you implied that you view Steve Jobs as such a visionary that the company would be in serious trouble without him. What, exactly, would Apple be losing? Not a hardware guy.
Thanks to tacit for beginning the support of my position that Steve Jobs is, indeed, a hardware guy; I'll expand on his excellent analysis, though, by suggesting that Jobs is also what I'll call a hardware visionary...a guy who is capable of looking down the road, envisioning a future, and visualizing the hardware necessary to achieve that future (forgetting altogether about whether or not his vision is shared by anybody else).
He's the guy who, 150 years ago, would have realized that the chemical and physical properties of the fraction of petroleum called "gasoline" suggested the automobile and would have put together a team to develop it regardless of the fact that he might not have know the difference between a screwdriver and a wrench.
Yeah... Steve Jobs is, first and foremost, a hardware guy, and his loss may ultimately cost Apple its ascendency; people talk about his team and how it complements his abilities and brings his visions to fruition in ways of which he's incapable, but I've never heard anybody suggest that there's a team-member who can duplicate, let alone expand on, what he
is capable of doing.
I truly believe that Steve Jobs has envisioned "The Emerald City" of "Oz," that what we've seen so far is no more that the first few paving stones of the "Yellow Brick Road," that unguessed at paving stones are under development, and that the entire project may ultimately grind to a screeching halt sometime after the "Wizard" passes on.
