More rants of a dead man

I’m not a big fan of apple (anymore) or jobs but I give jobs or whoever designed the iphone/ipod touch credit for one thing:
The do-anything-you-want design of desktop computers nowadays isn’t the right answer for most people.
Being able to set your desktop background, and change all your icons and create directories and install random software has done nothing for this world but advance the world of support problems.
I personally don’t care for it, but the iphone way of giving you a small menu of options and only letting you do the few useful things that they let you is really a better answer for the majority of consumer electronics users.
This is true for iphones and dvd players and tvs. Remember when they started putting zillions of options on TVs and nobody used any of them?
Remember when they put clocks on VCRs and they all blinked 12:00?
People don’t really want infinite configurability, and that is really the fundamental problem with the PC design.
Linux following in their wake wasn’t a terribly brilliant move either. And don’t be surprised if a lot of options go away on the MAC desktops as well, or maybe it will be called a mac-light. Or likely just a home version of the ipad with a keyboard.

This is one of my all time favorite articles. I quote it as often as I can. I just came across it again, thought I’d share.
http://www.newsweek.com/1997/09/14/a-week-of-sheer-fakery.html