My iPad disallows me to do tethering, functionality that's available on the iPad but that can be enabled/disabled by the career. My Android phone, from the same career, allows me to do pretty much whatever I want.
iOS doesn't have a terminal. And considering the recent moves with the Mac app store, how long before terminals will stop shipping with OS X?
> iOS doesn't have a terminal. And considering the recent moves with the Mac app store, how long before terminals will stop shipping with OS X?
Why not take this illogical train of thought even further? iOS tries to hide the filesystem from the user, so how long will it be before OSX does the same? iOS doesn't allow generic USB devices like 3G modems, so when can we expect that support to be removed from OSX?
I purchased an iMac for my mother two years ago, and she never could quite get the hang of it. The iPad that replaced it last Christmas has been working out much better. The same qualities that make iOS shitty for power users make it simpler and easier to use for the average populace.
OS X already hides the ~/Library folder, it's not far-fetched to think they might hide everything but the Photos, Documents, etc. folders.
I wouldn't say iOS is a terrible product, just that it's terrible for someone that knows how to use a computer. Apple is trying to get users that don't know what they are doing at the expense of the experience for users that do. I know I shall never buy another Apple computer if the trend continues.
You'd have a better argument if they got rid of the Library folder completely. Just because it's not a single click away anymore doesn't justify the slippery slope argument. OS X is not Linux. It's targeted to the general computer using populace and happens to be quite popular and useful for a very small minority of people like us. They still allow us to do everything we used to, it's just that they've hidden a few things that confused the normals out there. Big whoop.
Hold down Alt while clicking the Go menu to see your Library folder.
Your assertion that it isn't a slippery slope is subjective, as is my assertion that it is. Both viewpoints are valid.
However, I reject your solution. It's my machine, I want it to be a pleasant experience to develop on, I don't want to memorize a workarounds for a bunch of trivial problems that I have to apply to every machine I use.
I'm taking the defensive position of not investing too much of my time in their products because I think they will remove access to those folders, or lock down on application installs, or otherwise make the experience wretched for me sometime in the future.
The problem with this line of thought is that you're talking about the older generation (our mothers and grandmothers).
Teenagers today are power users, except for those who have much bigger problems than poor technical skills (like being freaking illiterate).
So shouldn't we optimize for our children instead? Isn't it plain stupid that we spend so much worrying about our mothers and grandmas?
The side effect is that we, as a society, are making efforts in keeping people dumb. Reading, as a skill, is hard to learn and it was considered optional and for power users even in the 17th century. Even today, I find it so stupid that movies are dubbed around the world, as if people can't be bothered to read freaking subtitles. That's how I learned English btw, something which would have never happened if I lived in Spain or Italy.
Do you really think teens today are power users? Every generation since I was a kid thought their kids were tech geniuses; having interacted with them, I know it wasn't true. So kids today use Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat. And Tumblr. I haven't seen any kind of trend for teens using Terminal or rolling their own. They appear to be proficient because the tools for normal people have gotten so much better.
Yes, I really think teens today are power users. I also interact with plenty of teens and also my wife works at a kindergarten - she has 4-year olds that know their way around a PC, enough to open their game or a browser.
Being a power user doesn't necessarily mean usage of a terminal, especially since most teens today use Windows on their PC, which has the shittiest terminal experience of them all. Heck, when I was a Windows user I wasn't using the terminal either, even though I was doing programming. Even if you are using the terminal in Windows, you don't really have much need for it since the whole freaking OS is anti-terminal and you can't do much with it. It's easy to forget this if you're a Mac or a Linux user.
This is not about teens being smarter btw. Older people simply don't have the patience to learn anymore, unless they see the real value in doing it. My folks also have a huge language barrier - they never learned English, as they were taught Russian and French in school and they forgot everything due to a lack of practice. For my mother, it doesn't matter how easy to use the device is, if it isn't localized.
Our tools definitely got better, but the only truly meaningful thing that changed since the late 90 is the availability of the Internet. When I was in high-school, in year 2000, we had no Facebook or Twitter, but I still had classmates that were communicating a lot over IRC and email. But they were doing so from school, because home Internet connections were expensive and shitty.
Seriously? iOS doesn't have a terminal? What are you going to do with a terminal on an iPad? Run operations on the non-existent file system? The iPad is not meant for computing. It's an entertainment device. That statement is almost like saying "TV manufacturers are forgetting about the power users! My new Sony flatscreen doesn't even come with a terminal so I could... uhh... adjust the picture, color, brightness, etc. from the command line instead of just using the real simple buttons on the side".
The Mac App Store doesn't really have any relationship with the terminal. There's no reason to believe that its in Apple's interest in any way to take away the terminal. It's still Unix underneath, they still provide developer tools, and they still need developers to write applications for them. In addtion Macs are still huge in the design/developer community because they're well suited to graphic design work with their appearance, focus on large screens and high resolutions, and performance. They're pretty big in the developer community too as you get a great "point and click" kind of OS with full and easy access to the terminal and most of the goodies you get with a full-fledged Linux machine.
Finally, your argument is that Apple is ignoring power users but you use an example where it's actually your carrier that's stopping you, not Apple. You said it yourself, the iPad does support tethering but your carrier is the one who enables/disables it. Seems more like your carrier is against power users, not Apple.
In the end, just because Apple makes the OS more "point and click" friendly and comes with a pretty opinionated set of defaults for non-power users doesn't mean they're trying to keep power users out. By definition, if you're a power user, these things they're doing should be a minor annoyance when you get a new Mac and after a couple of hours you should have your machine how you like it because... drumroll please... you're a power user and know how to do that stuff! I personally don't see much difference between OS X and some of the more "user-friendly" Linux distros. They've both got the same underlying tools and are working hard to make it so your grandma can pick it up and get emails of her grandchildren within an hour. What I think the real problem people have, which maybe they just don't see, is that they just don't like change in general. New versions of OS X come out and they hid an option somewhere and everyone goes nuts and says "Who moved my cheese! This is the worst computer ever!"
Actually the iPad does have a file system. You just don't have access to it.
> That statement is almost like saying "TV manufacturers are forgetting about the power users! My new Sony flatscreen doesn't even come with a terminal so I could... uhh...
Consequently, one of the reasons TV is dying is because it's just a dumb consumption device. I use my laptop, my Android and my iPad for 10 to 12 hours per day. I use my enormous flat-screen that's sitting in my room only for streaming movies from my laptop and yes, while connected to it sometimes I open the terminal.
> it's actually your carrier that's stopping you, not Apple
BULLSHIT. This is a device-level configuration setting that the career can remotely send to you. The device wasn't even bought from that career. It wasn't on a contract or anything like that.
It's my device and I find it unacceptable that the career can tell it what it can and cannot do. It's Apple's fault for giving them the option.
> By definition, if you're a power user, these things they're doing should be a minor annoyance
Actually it's a big annoyance because I'm the customer that pays money and why in the world would I pay for devices that are defective by design when I could be supporting companies that respect me and my needs? My current retina-enabled and shiny iPad is the last Apple product I'll ever buy.
iOS doesn't have a terminal. And considering the recent moves with the Mac app store, how long before terminals will stop shipping with OS X?