John Gruber responds to my earlier response on the iPhone and background tasks:
“What’s wrong with ‘since now’? A new platform can’t be innovative if it isn’t different.”
To which the correct answer, of course, is “nothing”. Apple can, indeed, decide that it’s now going to take responsibility for the behaviour of all applications on my machine. And, if Mike Ash of Rogue Amoeba is right about where Apple’s going with code signing then it may well do the same thing for the Mac going forward.
But if that’s the future, then I’m going to have to be excused from it. I am responsible for what gets installed on my machine, and I don’t want to be protected from the consequences of my occasional stupidity if the price is to hand all control over to Apple.
John goes on to my second point:
Imagine a scenario where background apps are allowed on the iPhone this summer. Some typical user buys and installs 10 apps from the App Store. Three of them are background-capable apps, and two of those three are so resource hungry that they have a noticeable drag on battery life. How are typical users — not Ian Betteridge, not me, and probably not you, but typical users — supposed to know which apps are causing the problem? How are they even going to know which apps do continue to run in the background? They won’t. A likely reaction would simply be to regret ever having junked up their iPhone with any third-party apps at all.
The problem is that me, John and his readers are far more typical of the kinds of user who will go crazy and install ten applications all at once than is the average non-geek phone user. The average non-smartphone user is going to install a game or two, maybe an IM application, and that’s probably it - partly because they’ll want to save much of that 8Gb memory for their photos, music and video, which is what they bought the phone for in the first place. He or she is not likely to install ten massive memory-hungry applications which constantly run in the background.
Or imagine a situation where a user installs five background-capable apps, none of which, on their own, significantly affect system-wide performance or battery life, but which in combination all running simultaneously, do. They’re all using RAM, all using the CPU, and all periodically using the network. What’s the advice for the typical user supposed to be? ‘Have fun with the App Store, but don’t install too much crap’?
Yes, that’s exactly what the advice should be. But, and this is the interesting bit, of course Apple can’t give that advice - because the response would be “What the hell is Apple doing selling crap on its store?”
But that’s down the decision that Apple has made not to allow third party applications to be sold elsewhere - so it’s hardly blameless here.
John continues:
“If you truly demand the right to be able to shoot yourself in the foot with the software you install on your phone — which is a perfectly reasonable desire, and is how things work on the Mac — then the non-jailbroken iPhone isn’t for you.”
Let me paraphrase that passage:
“If you truly demand the right to be able to shoot yourself in the foot with the software you install on your Mac, then the non-jailbroken Mac isn’t for you.”
Will John be making the same argument in a couple of years time, should Apple decide that it will “protect” Mac users in this way too?