This guy has it absolutely right. It also explains why the people in a perpetual uproar about how the Apple Store isn’t open are chasing a car. The hobbyist market, the chip head market, the people who want to tear it down and tinker are a very small minority of the total market, no matter how much folks like Doctorow and the EFF wish otherwise.
And the thing is, you can still tinker. You just have to be willing to live with the consequences. Apple still hasn’t gone after jailbreakers – hell, they haven’t yet gone after people who are reselling developer access to beta versions of iOS! – so if you want to delve into your device at some level, hardware or software, the potential is there, with the eternal caveat: buy the ticket, take the ride.
But I suspect a lot of the stick Apple is getting over this has nothing to do with actual tinkering hobbyists and everything to do with driving page views. You can bash the Beast of Cupertino and reliably draw hordes of angry MacMacs with their rainbow apple superimposed on the Apple Menu, convinced that it’s 1996 and Microsoft is still the greatest evil the world has ever known. (Nothing makes being a Mac user harder than the Mac obsessives.) And of course, there’s their opposite number, the rabid Apple haters who are convinced that this is what’s going to do Apple down for good – much like their failure to offer a 7″ tablet, or their failure to license the OS to third-party manufacturers (again), or the lack of a physical keyboard on the iPhone, or the lack of support for Windows Media formats on the iPod, or or or or. These are the same people who are convinced that a stylus and a keyboard cover are going to let the Surface completely destroy the iPad as a viable tablet experience.
I’ll have that bet.