Steve Jobs 1955-2011 - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

9 Oct 2011

On 10/9/11 10:00 AM, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
...
  > > 
>
> >  >  I have no liking of Apple products :
> >  >
> >  >  I regard them as being difficult to do anything useful with (my
esperience
> >  >  is that they make easy jobs trivial and diffiuclt jobs impossible).
> >  >
 >  I find that hard to believe.  These beasties run Unix, you can script
 >  almost anything.  Even the GUI is scriptable.  I prefer OS X or Linux
 >  over the evil OS from Redmond.
 >  Or are you talking about pre-OS X?  Yes, I was thinking about pre-OSX for
desktop Apple machines. I am told
 that OSX does have an accessible unix shell:-). However, their portable
 devices don't seem to have any such shell, they don't seem to have
 anything that makes them useful for difficult tasks. Why do some people feel the
need to be so self-righteous about products 
that they
don't use?  You don't like Apple products because of attributes of a 
product that
hasn't shipped in almost a decade?  How close-minded is that?

FWIW, I use that accessible unix shell under MacOS X to do my job as a 
Solaris
kernel developer.  Most of the machines that I use for work (and their 
consoles
and service processors) are network accessible and I have no problem 
debugging
kernel bugs and developing new Solaris features from my MacBook.

I don't buy your claim that Apple's portable devices (I presume that you 
mean iOS
devices like iPod touch, iPhone and iPad because my Mac laptops are 
portable)
"don't have anything that makes them useful for difficult tasks" because 
they don't
have a shell.  They are devices where the primary input method is touch 
gestures.
"Boy, my TV (or set-top box) is useless because it doesn't have a 
shell."  "Why
didn't put a shell interface on this microwave?  Worthless!"

I am an iOS app developer in my spare time. There are plenty of apps that do
difficult things.  And iOS devices even have consoles and crash dumps if 
you are
into that.

alan