On Apple Air
Jon Grant is thinking of running GNU+Linux on an Apple Air and asking Apple for a refund.
He’d make major primetime TV network news if he gets them to preload GNU+Linux or even get a refund, and would probably also send their stock down a few pegs :-)
“Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don’t. Apple doesn’t.”
I got an XO last week and someone recently said, “I’m surprised Apple isn’t involved with these things.”
To me, Apple is the total antithesis of OLPC: expensive, exclusive elitist kit, and in terms of learning about computers, an agent of ignorance - they hate sharing software and anyone but Apple employees knowing how their software works. (Update: Tim Dobson reminded me that Apple offered OS X to OLPC and it was turned down precisely because of this.)
I mentioned this to another friend and they suggested that Raskin and the team who made the original Macintosh in 1984 had similar aims, although they too were distributing proprietary software. I find it curious that the behavior of a team in a company over 20 years ago can still effect the perception of an utterly different company today in 2008.
Over the years, Apple’s hardware has become increasingly less upgradeable, and the Air laptop - no battery replacement, hermetically sealed - is the latest and most extreme example of this.
Sony and Toshiba are selling super-thin laptops too, and all three are under-powered in terms of computation power, and top-line expensive. But Apple is going to sell millions of these by making these aspects secondary and another value primary: beautiful product design.
To me, the free software movement is very clear that freedom is a more important primary value than the others. It always takes longer to get the other values to a similar level as any proprietary alternative while keeping our freedom, but our freedom to share software and have anyone improve it for us is hard-won and valuable.
As my friend Ian says, in his endearing West Country manner, “Macbook Air my arse”
The On Apple Air by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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