[svhybrnr] Steve Jobs

Have you ever had the feeling of utter helplessness and frustration with your computer?  This is Steve Jobs's most significant legacy and why he should be reviled instead of exalted.

From day 1, the original Macintosh was designed to be impossible to open with normal tools like a screwdriver.

There's an anecdote of Steve Jobs meeting with architects about a new Apple corporation building: he nixed the architects' plans for sliding windows.  Steve Jobs doesn't like people being able to open things.

Contrast Jobs's philosophy with the minority viewpoint of Richard Stallman's Free Software movement: software should always be modifiable by the user, and any user can share those modifications with anyone else.

I primarily use Free Software on my computers (Linux, etc.) and never feel that frustration that Mac (iPhone, etc.) users feel with their computer not acting the way they want it to, sometimes even deliberately designed to thwart certain actions you want to do.  Instead, the worst I feel is unhappiness that I don't have the time or money to make the modification I want to the misbehaving software.  (Sometimes I feel unhappiness at various others programmers heatedly egoistically arguing about how to modify some open-source software.)  But there is nothing, in principle, from me fixing my computer, and that is a tremendously wonderful philosophy, directly at odds with that of Steve Jobs.

In contrast, if your Mac is broken, you're too stupid to fix it; only Geniuses at the Apple Store Genius Bar can help you... for a fee.  What a great way to make money: make sure users are helpless.

Philosophies are hard to change.  Thanks to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and others who push closed-source software (and locked-down hardware with DRM), their philosophy has become the overwhelmingly majority view.  Most people just accept feeling helpless at their computer as reality, as something outside of their control.

You do have a choice.  Reject Steve Jobs.  Choose free and open-source software.

Without Steve Jobs, others would have certainly come around to invent the Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc.  There are plenty of artists and designers out there obsessed with clean lines and form.  Thus Steve Jobs's greatest impact on most people's daily lives, his greatest legacy, is that feeling of utter helplessness you feel being unable to fix or change or understand your computing machines.