As well as the enormous "Maker Shed" tax. My company made a product that was sold there, and Make wanted a >60% margin.

You would think that at least geeks would be appalled by Apple and avoid their products because of this. But every geek I know (save one or two) is raving about their Apple gadgets.

Wait, why should a geek be appalled that Apple cares about the quality of accessories people sell?

Its not like two weeks ago, before this product, you wouldn't hook an iPhone up to an RS-232 port! You could always do that if you wanted to hack together a solution.

Apple just made it official.

And really, $60? Seems a bit high, but there's the fact that this is a specialty product for a specialty market, and realy, if you're hardware hacking the time savings of buying a working product is well worth the $60.

I truly do not understand the idea that "geeks" wouldn't love Apple. To me, geeks are either people who really love technology, or people who have very strong engineering skills. I have both. And because of both, I really appreciate Apple doesn't waste my time , money or energy with crap. Apple makes first rate products, and that means I get to spend more time geeking.

People also seem to think that Apple has everything locked down. I don't see that at all-- you can work with nonstandard hardware if you're a developer by using the Apple supplied accessory SDK. Sure, consumers-- that is to say, non-geeks,-- are kept from hurting themselves to some extent by Apple, but that's a good thing. Means I can recommend their products to my mom.

You can make that three geeks.

I got pretty upset earlier this week. I wanted to do a site-survey of the wireless network that covers my company's campus.

The iPad is a wonderful tool for this, you'd think. It has a wifi chip, and a GPS. What I wanted was to drive around and pair signal strengths with GPS locations.

Except I can't do this on my iPad because Apple doesn't want me to. The API for getting wifi signal strength is off limits, and utilizing it will keep you out of the app store, which is the only legitimate pathway to getting applications onto the device. They've built the tricorder from star trek...but they've locked it inside of a box and won't let anybody use it.

This is absurd to me. Here apple has this really wonderful piece of hardware that is packed full of all kinds of sensors and things, and they're telling me that I can only use them for playing silly games? What the hell is that?

I ended up still doing the site survey, I even used apple hardware to do it, but the amount of hoops I had to jump through[1] was stupid.

[1]: I wrote a few lines of javascript that pulled GPS data from the geolocation api, and then called an ajax script to log this info into a mysql database with a timestamp.

I then ran a script on my laptop that polled System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport, and parsed the output for signal strength.

This got logged into another file, with a timestamp.

It was a simple matter to mesh these files together, and generate a KML file for google earth.

Now...this is all accessible to me because I'm a hacker; it should be accessible to everybody, and it shouldn't require that amount of duct tape and chicken wire.

Wait, did you want to hack together a solution, or sell something in the App Store?

You can run any software you want on your devices without Apple caring at all. Either your company is an enterprise licensee, or you pay your $99. Big deal.

$99 keeps the script kiddies out-- you know the ones who download iOS betas to show their friends and then complain that they managed to brick their device?

It's depressing to me that you would say something like this. Please tell me that you don't really believe this?

$99 keeps the script kiddies out? Excuse me? I've been running software written by "script kiddies" for my entire life, to great success. It's very likely that you have too. So has the rest of the world. Most of the internet runs on software written by those meddling "script kiddies".

That computer you've got your hands in front of right now? You need to spend $99 to run a web browser on it. You also need to write the web browser yourself.

Keeps those pesky script kiddies out, you see.

Script kiddies do not write software. They just use other people's software without understanding what it does.

So why is Parent concerned with keeping script kiddies out? If they don't write software, why would thy be writing software for the app store?

What are you talking about? You can write whatever you want for your device. You just can't sell whatever you want in Apple's store, but that is something completely different that using whatever API you want.

Edit: 1. I don't think you know what a script-kiddie is, 2. Your replies make no sense to the context of any msgs you are replying to.

Do you write your own kernel patches? Who wrote your userland?

Software is about communities and if you don't know this, you haven't been paying attention for the last 30 years.

Software is about standing on the shoulders of the people who came before you. If every developer has to write their own stack, and every developer has to pay $99 for the right to do so, we'd still be in the 70s.

How the hell do people honestly think that this is a valid excuse?

Do you think that econgeeker intends "script kiddie" to mean "teenage who downloads what they believe to be hacking software like back orifice or aol punters to their windows machine"?

What am I missing about the meaning of the word? The classic definition doesn't make any sense in the context of those posts.

Four geeks.

Proprietary control (at the software or hardware level) isn't some abstract bogeyman that only Free Software Hippies need to worry about. It's a very real threat.

>I've never met a real geek who thought Apple was exercising proprietary control outside of their realm. All of the people who complain about Apple like this-- that I know personally-- are not geeks who got into linux (and the "free" ideology) because it was cool, not because they're really hackers with engineering skills.

Is this a joke?

The real hackers are...apple fans, and the people who got into linux because they thought it was cool are all a bunch of posers?

M. Night Shyamalan, is that you?

It's a little like how people are aware that farm animals are often mistreated, but meat is delicious so they eat it anyway.

Yum.

Most Apple products, of course, are not $59 DB-9 cables. They're a bit more functional and have a bit more design appeal than that, to be fair. I'm sure you agree.