ARTS & FARCES internet

Macintosh sales represent a full third—US$22 billion—of Apple’s revenue for fiscal year 2010. And all we get is an updated operating system (not now; next summer) an updated MacBook Air, updated iLife, and a Mac App Store. Really? For a third of the business?

The touchpad- and mouse-based multitouch gesture support in Mac OS X Lion is a welcome improvement, but the good news apparently stops there.

The show-stopper is the Mac App Store. In 1984, Apple introduced the Mac with the jaw-dropping 1984 commercial. In the ad, an unnamed heroine representing the advent of Macintosh promised to save humanity from conformity. In the commercial, the Big Brother-like character is celebrating the anniversary of the “Information Purification Directives,” a once-and-for-all-forever end to “contradictory thinking.” Here’s the entire bit:

“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

Wait. What?

Everything comes full circle. It took Apple a remarkably short 26 years. Apple began being about individual empowerment, originality, anti-conformity, and a struggle of the few against the many for control of computer technology. Now, as Warren Ellis so eloquently pointed out barely three years ago, “Apple: You’ll Do What You’re Fucking Told.”

According to Sarah Perez, writing for ReadWriteWeb, everything that’s wrong with Apple’s iOS App Store got translated, without revision, to Apple’s Mac App Store. And to get at the official review guidelines, you have to be a registered developer with Apple:

• No non-public APIs, undocumented or hidden features
• No, or very few, duplicate apps
• No third-party installers; it’s Xcode or nothing, and no shared code or resources
• No kernel extensions
• No license keys, copy protection, or non-App Store updating
• No processes that continue to run after program termination without user consent
• Java and Rosetta are deprecated; no apps that require deprecated or optionally installed technology
• No apps that require root privileges
• No apps that add themselves to the dock or leave desktop shortcuts
• No referring to other computer platforms operating systems
• No apps with complex or less than very good interfaces

You’ll Do What You’re Fucking Told, indeed.

Of course, Apple apologists will quickly point out that Apple’s Mac App Store is just an app store, not the only app store, and they’re correct. For now. One thing that I find amazing—and it comes universally from those who have never run a business—is the begrudging Apple’s 30 percent take in the revenue split with developers. That, friends, is actually a bargain.

As Dan Gillmor points out, what’s “more important even than developers’ wishes are what Apple customers are allowed to do with machines for which they’ve paid a relative arm and leg.” For now, it’s anything we like. But later? I agree with Gillmor, when he writes, “I fear that Apple will use the inroads it makes with the Mac App Store to further restrict what users of future Macs can do. ... I believe this is the endgame, but I’m hoping for the best.”

Of course, there’s a chance—a slim one—that this is actually an experiment by Apple to see how well a walled garden can coexist with traditionally installed software of any kind that the user may wish to use. If this is an experiment, and if it’s successful, Apple may reverse-migrate it to its iOS devices.

But for now, a walled garden, no matter how decent and pretty and protected, is still a walled garden. I’m dusting off my Ubuntu chops just in case.