Do computer buyers hate the "walled garden," and want a computer they can tinker with?

[Voyager]

@zoid

I’ll take the walled garden any day as long as I can plug in a peripheral and it works instantly. No more remembering addresses for every card, no more re-setting dip switches, no more resolving memory conflicts - wall me in BABY!

I don’t consider that a wall, I consider it as the OS being smarter than not only the average by 99% of the users. I remember having to configure a USB wireless receiver for my desktop. I’ll take build in stuff, which after you set the password you never have to worry about any day. Any my newer phone is much smarter at this than my older laptop.

I’ve been setting up PCs since AT&T 6300s, and it has gotten a lot faster and simpler, so I can devote my time to copying over my wife’s bookmarks and stuff. And when everyone has cloud OS’s, we won’t even have to do that. I don’t with my thin client at work.

[Senegoid]

Here’s one thing going on here: The makers of GUI-based systems (which is kinda-sorta what I think of as walled gardens, sort of) sat down and tried to think of all the objects a system should have and all the things you might want to do with those objects. Then they give you icons, menus, and stuff like that to do all the actions they thought of that you might want to do.

With a more flexible UI (and I’m thinking of a Unix-style CLI with lots of general-purpose simple applications), you can do all sorts of more-or-less sophisticated things that the GUI designers never thought of.

Clear example: drewtwo99 has repeatedly asked how one might write a script to do some kind of text processing. Various people have helped him write bash scripts and even fancy one-line awk scripts to do things like scan a directory and perform some action on every file there, or concatenate a bunch of files and do some transformation on every line in those files, and other kinds of stuff like that.

I just don’t know how you do things like that, unless you have some kind of CLI-style interpreter to fall back on. Even if you launch your script by clicking on an icon for it, the script is still written in a CLI type of language.

Programs still run other programs by sending them command lines with command-line arguments, even if it’s all done behind the scenes. A user-accessible CLI just makes that interface directly user-accessible. Microsoft, in particular, seems intent on trying to hide this away from view as obscurely as they can.

[tellyworth]

@Voyager

Some libertarians are convinced that they are so smart they can do stuff better than the damn government. I’m a professional computer scientist, and I’ve taught Operating Systems, and I know that if 99.9% of self proclaimed computer geeks looked at Linux source they’d have no clue, and would screw things up if they changed something.

Best leave that to the Federal Department of Operating Systems I guess.

I’m a developer, and I work with many open source developers. I’d say 95% of them use Macs (as do I). Mostly I think it comes down to them working well out of the box, without tinkering required - there are no up-front hurdles. But it has a proper Unix command line and all the right tools when they’re needed.

[Justin_Bailey]

@Senegoid

Here’s one thing going on here: The makers of GUI-based systems (which is kinda-sorta what I think of as walled gardens, sort of) sat down and tried to think of all the objects a system should have and all the things you might want to do with those objects. Then they give you icons, menus, and stuff like that to do all the actions they thought of that you might want to do.

This is not even close to the definition of a walled garden. At all. You can’t even see the trees of the garden from your definition is.

[Mr.Slant]

@Mk_VII

For most of us, it’s just a tool to do a job, we are not interested in what goes on inside, unless it stops working. Any more than most of us are interested in working on our cars. We leave it to someone else, if it’s necessary; most are too time poor these days to acquire the skills.

I want my WORK computer to just work, uninterestingly.
I want to play with computers, but that shouldn’t be the same system I have to pay the bills with.

[Deegeea]

I don’t need all the customizability, but I like it to be there. Because when it isn’t, what happens is that you can’t do seemingly should be simple things.

Example: I got to use an Ipad for a conference a few months ago. They had set it up so you couldn’t install any apps. It just had the built in items and the app for the conference.

I used it to take some pictures at the conference. There was no way to copy them to a flash drive or upload them in the browser. The pictures taken on the Ipad were stuck on the Ipad unless you installed an app that could access them.

Very frustrating. The basic operating system of any device that can create files (pictures) should permit the transfer of those files (pictures) to another device.

[Leaper]

@Deegeea

Example: I got to use an Ipad for a conference a few months ago. They had set it up so you couldn’t install any apps. It just had the built in items and the app for the conference.

I used it to take some pictures at the conference. There was no way to copy them to a flash drive or upload them in the browser. The pictures taken on the Ipad were stuck on the Ipad unless you installed an app that could access them.

So… considering you know that the conference organizers deliberately limited the ways in which you could use the iPad, is there any evidence either way to speak to whether they wanted you to be able to take photos at the conference (and just forgot to “turn off” that feature, or were unable to), or whether they wanted you to be able send whatever photos you took?

[Voyager]

@Deegeea

I don’t need all the customizability, but I like it to be there. Because when it isn’t, what happens is that you can’t do seemingly should be simple things.

Example: I got to use an Ipad for a conference a few months ago. They had set it up so you couldn’t install any apps. It just had the built in items and the app for the conference.

I used it to take some pictures at the conference. There was no way to copy them to a flash drive or upload them in the browser. The pictures taken on the Ipad were stuck on the Ipad unless you installed an app that could access them.

Very frustrating. The basic operating system of any device that can create files (pictures) should permit the transfer of those files (pictures) to another device.

As a conference organizer I find this bizarre. I can see crippling functionality for kids, but why would they give you an expensive piece of hardware and then break it? Did you have to give it back? What kind of apps did they have?
In any case much as I dislike Apple, you can’t blame them for this one. I bet there is some way of doing a hard reboot on the system and getting it back, but I’m no expert on these thingies.

[Gukumatz]

The software side is currently free enough that I don’t much care, as long as I get to stay away from Apple products at work.

The hardware side annoys me more, since I foresee the move to MCM will be widely adopted, which could result in a slit throat for my hobbyist PC building.

[BigT]

Walled gardens suck. They don’t just stop tinkering. They cut off legitimate portions of the OS. They funnel what is and is not allowed to come into that garden. I’m all about apps. That’s not tinkering.

Neither Mac OS X nor Windows 8 is a walled garden. Windows RT is a walled garden: desktop apps that you might want to run can’t even be tried in Desktop mode (only Microsoft Office), and you can’t install anything from anywhere but the Microsoft Store. iOS devices also have a walled garden, and it’s worse because you have to pay Apple for the privilege of allowing other people to use your software, even if you want to give it away for free.

A walled garden doesn’t actually protect you. The point is to force you to do certain things a certain way. Security would just as well be accomplished with a locked door instead of a wall. You’d have to deliberately unlock it. Fortunately, the U.S. government currently seems to agree and allows jailbreaking, which is metaphorically installing a walled door.

Walled gardens are about control. It’s not libertarian to want to not be controlled in how you can use your own property when it doesn’t hurt anyone else. A better metaphor would be civil rights.

[Fool_in_the_Rain]

Looks like Apple is going the difficult route for DiY upgrades on iMac and Retina-equipped MacBook Pro

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234218/Upgrading_RAM_on_new_iMac_practically_impossible?source=rss_keyword_edpicks&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fs%2Ffeed%2Fkeyword%2FEditorsPicks+(Computerworld+Editors'+Picks)&google_editors_picks=true

Explaining the iMac’s low score, iFixit cited the copious amounts of “incredibly strong” adhesive that bonds the LCD and front glass panel to the frame. Earlier iMacs fixed the display in place with magnets rather than the hard-to-dislodge glue, which is even harder to replace.

Just as damning was an Apple design decision that makes it practically impossible for users to upgrade the iMac’s RAM. The 21.5-in. iMac comes standard with 8GB of memory – and can be upgraded to 16GB – but because the RAM is buried beneath the logic board, owners must “take apart most of the iMac just to gain access,” iFixit said.

Older 21.5-in. iMacs had four external RAM slots that were easily accessed by users.

Apple mentions the impracticality of memory upgrade only in a side note hidden on the iMac’s options page. There, Apple said: “Every 21.5-inch iMac comes with 8GB of memory built into the computer. If you think you may need 16GB of memory in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase, because memory cannot be upgraded later in this model.”

[Leaper]

Another bunch of comments from this old Slashdot thread that turned up today.

Some in it, if I interpret these comments correctly, argue/fear that the presence and popularity of walled gardens will eventually cause them to supplant everything else, leaving nowhere for freedom-loving programmers and users to go.