Carsons Post

Various and Assorted Thoughts and Observations Regarding the Just-Announced iPad

Thursday, 28 January 2010

Automatic Transmission

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

That’s not to say there aren’t trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it’ll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.

I disagree with this specific analogy and would like to offer another.

Up until the 90s the car engine was relatively simple. This meant that, whilst you didn't have to, you could try to understand the mechanics of the engine. If something went wrong, you could pop the hood and figure it out. I don't know the success rate of this, but it was -at the time - an option.

In the 1990's this became much harder. The modern engine seemed to have become too complicated for the average armchair mechanic to engage with. This was either due to car engines becoming too complex, or car companies understanding that by making the car engine inaccessible, the punters will always return.

Now, I believe there is an element of each. I don't like the motives of car companies, but cars are more complex and more efficient than ever before.

The question is, does this analogy transfer?

I think so. I would have liked to "lift the hood" on my iPod Touch - and did so by jailbreaking it. By doing this I went to such extremes that nobody in the world could have argued that I hadn't voided the warranty and therefore dismissed Apple of any responsibility for product performance on my device.

So, why does Apple care about what I do to the device?

Well, if it was about shifting gears as @Gruber says, I'm opting to shift. I'm shifting down in order to pass. There are metaphorical reasons why someone would override an automatic gearbox.

However, I don't think its about shifting gears. I think Apple wants to keep people from understanding what is under the hood. To me, keeping people from looking at whats under the hood is a cynical idea. It ensures that people can't understand the mechanics of their machine in order to fix it themselves. I removes the transparency of understanding what the engine is doing. It makes the experience more dependent on expensive Specialists to fix problems. Mechanics who can say whatever they like because you as the layperson have not had access to assess the actual problem. Its not about shifting gears, it about ownership of a device.

The thing is, that as far as I understand, the most economical and technologically advanced code (the metaphorical advance car engine) is not found in closed systems that mimic a Porsche engine. Instead some of the most elaborate and exceptional code is open sourced, and therefore the antithesis of any Apple argument that restricting access to the code improves efficiency. So the car analogy only works if you say: by Apple restricting access to the blood and guts of the OS they are improving the possibility you'll return for repair or upgrade of a device rather than simply fixing it, at the trade-off of ensuring the code remains of an equal or lesser quality.

Personally, I'm not keen.