John Gruber

John Gruber has posted a really interesting and insightful piece on BlackBerry vs. iPhone, and why he thinks that RIM is, fundamentally, in a very very bad place indeed.

However, there’s one point that I have to disagree with John on:

“In broad terms, BlackBerrys are optimized first for email; the iPhone for the web. What’s more important, an email client or a web browser? For most people, and perhaps even most current BlackBerry users, the answer is clearly the web.”

For the majority of business users, I think John has got this completely wrong. For them, the ability to send and receive emails, and view the attachments which come with them, is far more important than web browsing. Witness the number of users who spend their time in meetings thumbing their BlackBerry.

That’s not to say that John is necessarily wrong in his overall point that iPhone is going to eat RIM’s lunch. But in optimising for email, as John acknowledges, RIM are actually delivering something that’s far more desirable for business than a device that’s optimised for web.

John Gruber takes Mary Jo Foley to task:

“Nack then deftly deflates this jacktastic report from Mary Jo Foley that Hamburg is going to work on ‘SmartFlow’, a supposed Lightroom/Aperture competitor she says Microsoft is working on. Think about it — if Hamburg wanted to work on photo library/imaging tools, wouldn’t he continue to lead Lightroom — an app whose UI and very interesting, very original internal architecture he completely oversaw from its inception?”

I think that John is probably right about the reasons for Hamburg’s departure, but it’s worth bearing in mind that people can and do leave one company for another to work on substantially the same kind of project. There are lots of potential reasons for leaving a company to go to a competitor to do the same thing, from money through to internal issues of management. Hamburg might well want to leave to do the same project again, but better, for more money, or in a better working environment.

Unless he has inside info - and if so, he ought to at least mention that fact - John is making the same kind of educated guess that Mary Jo also (apparently) made. It’s a bit harsh of John to call Mary Jo’s report “jacktastic” when his own reasoning about Hamburg’s motivations are, apparently, based on no more substantial facts than hers.

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?

The Flip Side of the Multitasking Argument:

“As I wrote this morning, I don’t think the ‘no background’ policy implies any spite or shortsightedness on Apple’s part. It’s simply the result of Apple’s decision to focus first and foremost on maximizing battery life and performance. Other mobile platforms, such as Android, may well have different priorities”

This may indeed be why Apple is blocking background processes, although there could be other potential reasons. But more importantly, since when was it the responsibility of the maker of an operating system to prevent poorly-written applications?

Of course, you could argue that the phone is a “mission-critical” piece of equipment and you can’t afford for it to perform badly. But that argument is bunk: all you need to do is allow users to uninstall applications if they find them slowing things down.

And, of course, the same argument could be made for my laptop, which is a mobile device that’s highly mission-critical for me. Will Apple be making that argument in the future, too?