Jobs’s desire to build closed systems can be traced all the way back to the original Mac. In the early days of the PC, computers were notoriously unreliable. They were prone to constant crashes, freezes, and reboots. Users were just as likely to lose hours of work on a document as they were of successfully printing it. This was as true of Apple’s computers as it was of computers from IBM, Compaq, or Dell.
One of the biggest problems was expansion slots, which allowed owners to upgrade and expand their machines with extra hardware like new graphics cards, networking boards, and fax/modems. The slots were popular with businesses and electronics hobbyists, who expected to be able to customize their machines. For many of these customers, that was the point: they wanted computers that could easily be hacked for their purposes. But these expansion slots also made early computers notoriously unstable. The problem was that each piece of add-on hardware needed its own driver software to make it work with the computer’s operating system. Driver software helps the operating system recognize the hardware and sends commands to it, but it can also cause conflicts with other software, leading to lockups. Worse, drivers were often badly programmed: they were buggy and unreliable, especially in the early days.
In 1984, Jobs and the Mac development team decided they would try to bring an end to the crashes and freezes. They decided that the Mac wouldn’t have expansion slots. If it couldn’t be expanded, it wouldn’t suffer from these driver conflicts. To make sure there was no tinkering, the case was locked shut with proprietary screws that couldn’t be loosened with an ordinary screwdriver.
Critics saw this as a clear indication of Jobs’s control-freak tendencies. Not only was his machine unexpandable, he physically locked it shut. Jobs had boasted of his desire that the Mac would be the “perfect machine,” and here he was ensuring it. The Mac’s perfection would survive even after it was shipped to users. It was locked shut to protect them from themselves: they wouldn’t be able to ruin it.
But the idea wasn’t to punish users; it was to make the Mac more stable and less buggy, and to enable programs to be integrated with each other. “The goal of keeping the system closed had to do with ending the chaos that had existed on the earlier machines,” said Daniel Kottke, a teenage friend of Jobs’s and one of Apple’s first employees.
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Additionally, the lack of expansion slots allowed the hardware to be simplified and cheaper to manufacture. The Mac was already going to be an expensive machine; eliminating expansion cards would make it a little bit cheaper.
But it turned out to be a wrong decision at the dawn of the fast-moving PC industry. As Andy Hertzfeld, the whiz kid programmer on the original Mac development team, explained: “The biggest problem with the Macintosh hardware was pretty obvious, which was its limited expandability,” Hertzfeld wrote. “But the problem wasn’t really technical as much as philosophical, which was that we wanted to eliminate the inevitable complexity that was a consequence of hardware expandability, both for the user and the developer, by having every Macintosh be identical. It was a valid point of view, even somewhat courageous, but not very practical, because things were still changing too fast in the computer industry for it to work.”
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These days, most of Apple’s machines are expandable. Computers at the high end of Apple’s range have several expansion slots. Thanks to new programming tools and certification programs, which require rigorous testing, software drivers are much better behaved on both Macs and Windows. And yet Macs enjoy a much better reputation for stability than Windows computers.
Modern Macs use much the same components as Windows PCs. The guts are almost identical, from the central Intel processor to the RAM. Same is true of the hard drives, video cards, PCI slots, and the chipsets for USB, WiFi, and Bluetooth. The internal components of most computers are interchangeable, whether they come from Dell, HP, or Apple. As a result, the computer business is a lot less incompatible than it used to be. Many peripherals like printers or webcams are compatible with both platforms. Microsoft’s Intellimouse plugs right into a Mac, and it works instantly and flawlessly.
The biggest difference between the Mac and the PC is the operating system. Apple is the last company in the industry that still has control of its own software. Dell and HP license their operating systems from Microsoft. The problem is that Microsoft’s operating system must support hundreds—maybe thousands—of different hardware components, assembled in potentially millions of different ways. Apple has it much easier. Apple makes only two or three major lines of computer, most of which share common components. The Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook are all basically the same computer in different packages.
From this perspective, Windows is an extraordinary achievement of engineering. The range and scope of the hardware it runs on is quite impressive. But there are so many variables that it can’t hope to provide the same level of compatibility and stability. Microsoft’s major initiative to make hardware more compatible—Plug and Play—became known as Plug and Pray because there were so many combinations of hardware and software and the results were unpredictable.
Apple, on the other hand, has a much smaller hardware base to support, and the results are much more predictable. In addition, if something goes wrong, there’s only one company to call. Customers of Dell or Compaq dread phone-support hell, where the hardware maker blames Microsoft, and Microsoft blames the hardware maker.
“PlaysForShit".
Take Microsoft’s music system PlaysForSure, launched in 2005. Licensed to dozens of online music companies and manufacturers of portable players, PlaysForSure was supposed to be an iPod killer. It would offer more competition and better prices. Trouble is, it was unbelievably unreliable.
I had several of my own nightmare experiences with it. I knew there were problems, but I was truly shocked at how crappy it was. In 2006,
Amazon.com
introduced a video download service called Amazon Unbox. Launched to great fanfare, the service promised hundreds of movies and TV shows “on demand,” which could be quickly and easily downloaded to a PC hard drive with a single click. The service promised that video could be copied to PlaysForSure devices like an 8-Gigabyte SanDisk player I was testing.
Actually, Amazon didn’t promise its video would play on PlaysForSure devices; it said video
might
play on PlaysForSure devices. “If your device is PlaysForSure-compliant, it may work,” said Amazon’s website.
May
work? Surely this was a joke? The point of PlaysForSure was that media would play for sure. Alas, it didn’t. After fiddling with it for hours, plugging and unplugging the player, restarting the PC, reinstalling software, and searching the Web for tips, I gave up. Life’s too short.
The problem is that Microsoft makes the software that runs on the computer, but SanDisk makes the software that controls the player. Over time, Microsoft made several upgrades to its PlaysForSure software to fix bugs and security problems, but to work properly with the new software, SanDisk players also had to be updated. While Microsoft and SanDisk tried to coordinate the updates, there were sometimes conflicts and delays. The more companies involved, the more the problems confounded. Microsoft struggled to support dozens of online stores and dozens of player manufacturers who, in turn, had shipped dozens of different models. Hardware companies had a hard time persuading Microsoft to fix PlaysForSure problems, which included glitches transferring subscription songs and even failures to recognize connected players. “We can’t get them to fix the bugs,” Anu Kirk, a director at Real, told CNet.
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In addition, all the troubleshooting had to be performed by the user, who had to seek out the latest updates and install them.
Apple, on the other hand, was able to issue similar upgrades to tens of millions of iPods quickly and efficiently through its iTunes software. If there was a new version of the iPod software, iTunes would automatically update the iPod when it was plugged into the computer—with the user’s consent, of course. It was, and is, a highly efficient, automated system. There’s only one software application and, essentially, one device to support (even though there are several different models).
At the time, there was a lot of criticism of Apple’s growing monopoly of the online music market and the tight integration between the iPod and iTunes. And while I object intellectually to being locked into Apple’s system, at least it works. I’ve used an iPod for several years, and it’s easy to forget how seamless the iPod experience is. It’s only when things go wrong with your gadgets that you stop and take notice. In the years I’ve been using an iPod, I’ve never had a problem—no lost files, no failure to sync, no breakdown of battery or hard drive.
Stability and User Experience: The iPhone.
One of the big selling points for the Mac is the suite of iLife applications: iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, and the like. The apps are designed for everyday creative activities: storing and organizing digital photos; making home movies; recording songs to post to MySpace.
The iLife apps are a big part of what makes the Mac a Mac. There’s nothing like it on Windows. Steve Jobs often points this out as a differentiating feature. It’s like an exclusive version of Microsoft Office that’s available only on the Mac, but it’s for fun, creative projects, not work.
One of iLife’s selling points is that the applications are tightly integrated with each other. The photo application, iPhoto, is aware of all the music stored in iTunes, which makes it easy to add a soundtrack to photo slideshows. The home-page building application, iWeb, can access all the pictures in iPhoto, which makes uploading photos to an online gallery a two-click process. Integration on the Mac is not limited to the iLife suite, however. Across the board, much of Apple’s software is integrated: Address Book is integrated with iCal which is integrated with iSync which is integrated with Address Book, and so on. This level of interoperability is unique to Apple. Microsoft’s Office suite offers a similar level of integration, but it is restricted to the productivity apps that ship with Office. It’s not systemwide.
The same philosophy of integration and ease of use extends to the iPhone. Jobs took a lot of criticism for closing the iPhone to outside developers, but he did so to ensure stability, security, and ease of use. “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” Jobs explained to
Newsweek
. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular [not AT&T] doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”
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While Jobs is exaggerating that one unruly app will take down a cell network, it can certainly take down a single phone. Just look what the open-platform approach has done to Windows (and, yes, Mac OS X, too, to a lesser extent)—it’s a world of viruses, Trojans, and spyware. How to avoid? Make the iPhone closed. Jobs’s motivation is not aesthetics, but user experience. To ensure the best user experience, the software, hardware, and services users access will be tightly integrated. While some see this as lockdown, to Jobs it’s the difference between the pleasure of the iPhone and the pain of a confusing off-brand cell phone. I’ll take the iPhone. Because Apple controls the whole widget, it can offer better stability, better integration, and faster innovation.
Devices will work well if they are designed to work well together, and it’s easier to add new features if all parts of a system are developed under the same roof. Samsung’s TVs don’t crash because Samsung takes care of the software as well as the hardware. TiVo does the same.
Of course, Apple’s iPhone/iPod/iTunes system is not perfect. It too crashes, freezes, and wipes files. The integration of Apple’s apps offers a lot of benefits, but it means that Apple is sometimes too inwardly focused when better services come along. For many people, Flickr offers a better experience for uploading and sharing photos, but users need to download a third-party plug-in to make it as easy as uploading photos to Apple’s web services. Macs still crash and peripherals can go unrecognized when plugged in—but in general, their stability and compatibility are better than Windows’. Thanks to Jobs’s control freakery.
The Systems Approach
Jobs’s desire to control the whole widget has had an unexpected consequence, which has led Apple to a fundamentally new way of creating products. Instead of making stand-alone computers and gadgets, Apple now makes whole business systems.
Jobs first got a peek at this systems approach in 2000 while developing iMovie 2. The application was one of the first consumer-friendly video-editing applications on the market. The software was designed to let people take footage from a camcorder and turn it into a polished piece of filmmaking with edits, fades, a soundtrack, and credits. With subsequent versions, movies could be posted on the Web or burned to DVD to share with Grandma.
Jobs was delighted with the software—he’s a lover of digital video—but soon realized that iMovie’s magic wasn’t conjured up by the software alone. To function properly, the software had to be used in conjunction with several other components: a fast plug-and-play connection to the camcorder; an operating system that recognized the camera and made an automatic connection; and a suite of underlying multimedia software that provided video codes and real-time video effects (QuickTime). It occurred to Jobs that there weren’t many companies left in the PC business that had all these elements.
“We realized Apple was uniquely suited to do this because we are the last company in this business that has all the components under one roof,” Jobs said at Macworld in 2001. “We think it’s a unique strength and we discovered this with iMovie, that it could make a digital device like a camcorder worth ten times as much. It has ten times as much value to you.”