Playing in Gatekeeper’s sandbox:
While pundits often seem to divide the computer-using public into “developers” and “people who can’t find where they saved their files,” there’s a lot of ground between those two extremes, and a lot of people in that ground are going to keep wanting desktops and laptops for the foreseeable future. While I can’t absolutely rule out Apple turning its back on them, I haven’t seen anyone make a particularly good business case as to why Apple would. “Because they can” is not a particularly good business case.
(Via Coyote Tracks)
Well put. Marco Arment made a similar point on his podcast this week. We have to stop thinking that there are only two kinds of computer users—geeks and complete noobies. There’s a spectrum of knowledge, and everyone is somewhere along it. And many more are further down the geek side than we like to think.
So forget the conspiracy theories about Apple pushing out the geeks and just catering to the complete novices. The goal of OS X has always been to make computing easier for all of us. Apple doesn’t always succeed at this, of course, but if you look back at the intentions behind most of its decisions, and you look at the complaints from power users, it usually boils down to some degree of Apple being perfectly comfortable with throwing out old habits to try something simpler, and power users hating change of any kind. Occasional misstep aside, the overall progression for OS X has been to make it easier to do things, as long as you’re willing to adapt.
Watts’s later point about file sharing between apps, meanwhile, may be a good example of one of those missteps. Or maybe it’s just a temporary hiccup along the path to a better world. Who knows?
