Howdy all,
In a conversation with a close friend, I had to explain why her Apple
product would not “work with” GNU+Linux.
Specifically, she wanted to use our free-software-only GNU+Linux
workstation at home to put audio and video files on to the Apple device,
and play them there.
I came up with a quick analogy that had problems. I now have a better
one, and I would like YOUR feedback on improving it:
Consider if Apple had sold you a new refrigerator.
A refrigerator performs the pedestrian function of preserving food and
making it available when needed, and this refrigerator advertises that
capability.
The refrigerator you bought from Apple is also beautiful in form: curved
edges, easy access doors without visible handles, silent hinges. The
accessible interior is gorgeous also: the shelves invite storage of food
and even make it look better and simple to work with.
Not only is it beautiful, it also does more: it allows easy manipulation of
the food in intuitive ways, even allows you to combine them nicely and
suggesting Apple-recommended dishes to make with these groceries.
Apple has gone to great effort with these refrigerators, to make them
“integrated” with large multinational chain supermarkets. You can get your
food into the fridge without needing to learn much about all the different
stores; the experience of getting the food there is quick to learn. You
can, in effect, get groceries into the Apple refrigerator using a single
interface.
This is a very popular mode of operation: Apple have spent a great deal on
marketing this new way of getting food into refrigerators and working with
the food, and most of your friends and family also have gone over to using
Apple refrigerators.
Your new Apple refrigerator does indeed preserve the food you put into it
from the chain supermarkets, and makes the food ready whenever you want it.
It is so pleasant to work with that you are very impressed, and soon all
your other ways of working with food seem difficult and make you long for
working with your Apple refrigerator again.
Everyone soon comes to expect that they can get their food into the
refrigerator easily everywhere and work with it. After all, the large
multinational chain supermarkets are everywhere, and everyone uses them.
But there's a problem: That single interface, which works so well with the
large multinational chain supermarkets, is not available at your local
farmer's market.
You discover this problem some time after buying the expensive Apple
refrigerator and falling in love with it. The discovery that the local
farmer's market is somehow different, not providing the easy access to
Apple-refrigerated food storage, makes you think something must be wrong
with the farmer's market. Why wouldn't everyone just do food the Apple way,
which is obviously so much better?
You have a friend who uses the local farmer's market; she is often doing
things rather differently from everyone else. You think she's a little
strange for choosing to do so many things in ways that seem difficult and
awkward, but it's her choice.
You notice she doesn't have an Apple refrigerator, but she does know a lot
about food storage, so you ask her how to get the farmer's market food to
work with your Apple refrigerator.
Your friend gets a tired look on her face. (You've noticed this look
before, when discussing some new kitchen device you bought and problems
with it that seem obvious to you.) She has obviously encountered this
issue. Maybe she knows how to fix the farmer's market; after all, that's
the only part that's not working properly and she knows a lot about the
farmer's market.
But your friend says something surprising: she thinks there's nothing wrong
with the farmer's market, and the problem is with Apple somehow.
Your friend talks a lot about the market-to-refrigerator interface, and
about how Apple is trying to control your refrigerator, and about how you
*could* put farmer's market food in the refrigerator but it would simply
not preserve that food nor let you cook with it.
This doesn't seem right; your friend is saying a lot of things that seem
hard to believe. How could a refrigerator work with *everyone else's* food
(your other friends happily use the multinational chain supermarkets and
they never talk about food spoiling in their Apple refrigerator), but not
with the farmer's market?
You insist your friend must be mistaken: the problem is clearly with the
farmer's market. Can she help you get the Apple refrigerator working with
the farmer's market or not?
Well, your friend explains, Apple have gone to *special effort* to make
sure that only Apple-approved interfaces will put the food into the
refrigerator properly. She tries to explain the reasoning, but this is all
sounding too much like a conspiracy theory.
You start to get impatient. Your friend has been happily using farmer's
market food for a long time. Even though it seems to be more difficult, the
produce is less attractive and the groceries you're used to aren't
available, and it all involves a lot more work. You've seen and tasted a
lot of the great meals she's produced as a result.
Why is she making this more difficult than it needs to be, you ask? Surely
if the farmer's market doesn't work with the Apple refrigerator, the
obvious solution is just to use the same standard Apple interface all the
multinational chain supermarkets use, and everything will work fine.
Your friend starts talking now about proprietary interfaces, and restricted
protocols, and other topics she's bored you with before. She says that
Apple makes the interface, and they refuse to make it for farmer's markets
or any place that isn't one of the few multinational chain supermarkets.
Okay, but you've seen your friend getting around restrictions like that
before. Can't she use her clever farmer's market skills to get it working?
Your friend repeats that the problem isn't with the farmer's market. She
now demonstrates by putting some farmer's market food into the refrigerator
directly: it looks a bit awkward the way she does it, since you're used to
the Apple refrigerator interface. But it's there; or at least, that's what
it looks like until you try to use the refrigerator.
Though she shows you the food is there in the refrigerator, she's right:
the refrigerator acts like the food isn't even there, so it won't work with
that food. This is obviously no good; that food is inaccessible, making it
pointless to put the food in there.
Your friend goes further and makes some fairly frightening suggestions,
about *modifying* your Apple refrigerator and making it behave differently
from everyone else's!
She also points out that your refrigerator is deliberately restricted, and
Apple is treating you like a prisoner or a slave by limiting what you can
do; even though you bought it, you effectively don't own it.
At this point you regret raising the topic at all, and you excuse yourself
from the discussion, taking your Apple fridge to a chain supermarket where
you know it will work.
So, with this information from your friend, there are a few options:
* You can dismiss your friend's claims as paranoid conspiracy delusion.
Everyone else with an Apple refrigerator encourages you to do this; she
clearly thinks Apple is some kind of evil mastermind corporation
controlling the world through refrigerators, which can't be right.
* You can forever keep your Apple refrigerator separate from farmer's
markets, or any market that isn't one of the multinationals approved by
Apple.
This, you admit, probably means you'll stop shopping at farmer's markets.
There are some nice aspects of farmer's markets, but you can come up with
lots of rationalisations for why it would be good to avoid them: they're
difficult to use, nothing seems the way you expect, things are
inconsistent between each one, they lack the professional polish of the
multinational chains, and so on.
* You can learn more from your friend about modifying your Apple
refrigerator to remove these restrictions she talks about.
This seems to involve losing some of the things you like most about how
it works, and definitely involves voiding the Apple warranty.
* You can decide maybe all this trouble *is* because Apple has built those
restrictions into the device.
Perhaps sell it – but nobody else is making anything nearly nice enough
as a replacement. (Your ask your friend what she uses, and she shows you
an *ice box* for her refrigeration, and you certainly don't want to go
back to that!)
--
\ “I'm beginning to think that life is just one long Yoko Ono |
`\ album; no rhyme or reason, just a lot of incoherent shrieks and |
_o__) then it's over.” —Ian Wolff |
Ben Finney
