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Not thrilled with Apple at the moment
Apr. 11th, 2010 11:39 pmI've spent a good bit of time today restoring my hard drive from an external backup after it crashed. Apple's Time Machine had been handling the backups. When it was time to restore, I followed all the directions only to discover that it would apparently take 270 hours to copy all the files back. (It really should take about 8, so there's some serious bug in their software) Online forums suggested that this is a common bug and that there is no good solution. I ended up doing a drag and drop copy of the files followed by a fresh OS install to fix whatever crucial OS bits that Time Machine neglected to backup. Things appear to be almost back to normal now, but it took much of the day to get to this point.
While waiting for the restore file copy, I read a bunch of news stories about how Apple has killed off all the 3rd party toolkits that had been designed to make it easier to develop iphone apps. The capriciousness with which Apple exerts total control of the iphone app development environment is rather concerning. Small developers never know when the rug is going to be pulled out from under them, potentially ruining months or years of work.
The iphone was a great step forward from the very closed mobile app development environment of the mid 2000s -- it broke the stranglehold that the mobile carriers had on innovation. However, the iphone is still a very closed platform compared to a full laptop computer... you essentially cannot create programs for it without Apple's consent. Now the iphone's big brother, the ipad, has arrived. I'm sure the ipad is a great and innovative piece of technology (and I'll probably go in and play with one to get a sense of what they've done), but it is bringing the closed platform to a larger form factor. I hope the trend does not continue to the point where Apple's laptops essentially become locked down, and Apple becomes the sole arbiter of what you can and can't do on your laptop.
While waiting for the restore file copy, I read a bunch of news stories about how Apple has killed off all the 3rd party toolkits that had been designed to make it easier to develop iphone apps. The capriciousness with which Apple exerts total control of the iphone app development environment is rather concerning. Small developers never know when the rug is going to be pulled out from under them, potentially ruining months or years of work.
The iphone was a great step forward from the very closed mobile app development environment of the mid 2000s -- it broke the stranglehold that the mobile carriers had on innovation. However, the iphone is still a very closed platform compared to a full laptop computer... you essentially cannot create programs for it without Apple's consent. Now the iphone's big brother, the ipad, has arrived. I'm sure the ipad is a great and innovative piece of technology (and I'll probably go in and play with one to get a sense of what they've done), but it is bringing the closed platform to a larger form factor. I hope the trend does not continue to the point where Apple's laptops essentially become locked down, and Apple becomes the sole arbiter of what you can and can't do on your laptop.
