There’s not a lot of sense coming out of Steven Berling’s Disruptive Technology blog. Yes, it’s ZDNet. Bear with me.
The main points seem to be with the facts that Mac OS X has been “hacked” so it runs on vanilla PCs. And the iPhone has also been hacked months before the advent of the SDK.
Berlind thinks this is going to force Apple into licensing Mac OS X for third party hardware.
I had an animated gif of tumbleweed here but it was kinda annoying
Steven – what on earth are you talking about? I could understand it if Apple’s sales were flagging or if they needed to open up to a new marketplace, maybe to get some developer interest by supporting commodity bargain-basement hardware. But Apple isn’t flagging, it’s been ages since anyone described them as beleaguered (now they use that to describe Nortel, Microsoft, Dell, Gateway).
Apple is doing well in their current model and if they’re doing well why would they want to change? They have a hot selling phone product, they’re selling more Macs than they ever have and they have the attention of motivated hackers dedicated to making the platform better.
So this is going to force them to open the platform?
Berlind discusses this as a uniquely Apple problem and he’s half right. It’s uniquely Apple but it’s not really a problem. Apple is not dedicating hordes of engineers to combat this any more than there were hordes of engineers “hiding” the music on an iPod. If they were wasting significant resource then Berlind might have a point here but there’s no evidence that any of the Firmware updates for iPhone were designed to stop hacking. Plus they’ve not been vehement in trying to stop Mac OS X hacking either. It’s not as if we have Macintosh Genuine Advantage to worry about.