From a product design standpoint, what's really significant about the fact that Steve Jobs is finally opening up the iPhone for 3rd-party development?
For us, it illuminates a simple fact often overlooked by the Cult of Mac: as cool as Apple is, they're just as motivated by profit as un-cool Microsoft--they just do it with better industrial design. We believe Apple's industrial design is so good that people often feel a non-commercial kinship with the company, because we're so used to dealing with crappy products that anyone who's designed a good one becomes our friend.
As nice a guy as Jobs may seem, and as much as we may admire him and the products he champions, we think it's important to remember he's probably got a dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged somewhere in his office. No judgments, we're just saying.
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Comments
We should be so lucky to have more real-life John Galts in the world...
2 % market shares but with a shotgun ...LOL!
As a practicing industrial designer, I know how difficult it is to bring a beautifully, well designed tech product to market, and I'm amazed with Apple's products. These product's weren't easy to produce.
What's wrong with Atlas Shrugged? Ayn Rand is one of my favorite authors, and if there were more people like John Galt, Howard Roark, and Steve Jobs, the world would be a better place.
That Apple was a for-profit company was made obvious in the original Apple-software-only release of the iPhone locked into a Cingular network for a $600 price tag.
This is clearly a step toward making the iPhone a better value (as 3rd party software development will clearly add value to the device), which should be the definition of good design. This is something that iPhone users have been clamoring for from the beginning. That Apple now intends to make this available at no extra cost to existing iPhone users seems to completely contradict the lesson learned.