Poisoned apples

In 1986 the first personal computer labs opened at the University of Chile’s school of engineering.
One of the labs had some attractive Apple Macs, the other a larger number of PCs.
Of course there were more PCs than Macs, because the latter were more expensive. But guess which machines got the most attention.

Still, over time I ended up using the PCs much more than the Macs. The main reason was that, apart from drawing or laying out text in pretty fonts, it was very hard to write programs on the Mac. There was a Pascal for the Mac environment, but it was pretty limited. On the PCs I learned to use Turbo Pascal and took my first steps in C. There was more software available on the PCs. They weren’t as glamorous as the Macs, but for a born programmer like me, there was far more freedom on those old DOS PCs than on the Mac.

I’ve never owned an Apple machine, and I don’t know if I ever will, even though Apple makes the sexiest hardware in existence, and I won’t deny I’d like to get my hands on an iPhone. Because the consumerist side of my personality would feel comforted. Because you have to admit Apple’s products are seductive.

Even so, I think Jobs is old-fashioned. At a time when we are all changing paradigms, when we don’t just want to consume, we also want to produce and above all share, Jobs’s strategies aim to perpetuate the idea of the user as consumer.

Jobs is an elitist; he doesn’t believe in free culture or any of that. He wants to control the content. He wants us all to use his gadgets so he can control the content better. Apple’s software has never been free, and we know the FSF people are no friends of Apple.

I’ve said it before: in many ways Bill Gates is better than Steve Jobs. Those who prefer Apple over Microsoft really have no idea about technology or history; they are under the spell of Jobs’s reality distortion field.

That’s why I’m worried by the news that our government has signed an agreement with Apple. I would have expected an alliance with some other company, not with one that only wants to grow its base of producers.

I’m suspicious of whatever educational initiatives Apple might develop, really. I find it hard to see us ever running Sugar applications on the iPhone. Technically it’s feasible, but I don’t think it will happen, because Apple doesn’t want to open its platform; we know how hostile it is toward those who have tried to open up the iPhone, and it has no intention of changing its attitude.

A lab for kids based on Apple products is worse than one based on Windows. At least there are more people trained to develop on Windows!

But what else can we expect from a government that is lost when it comes to technology, full of people ignorant of these matters making the decisions?

Let’s not end up eating a poisoned apple.