I can’t speak for original iPhones (I was not an adopter), but my parents are still using iPhone4. And I totally get why. I still maintain a couple of IRIX boxes so I can still run some licensed software. But maybe the reason nobody builds pyramids or 'henges any more is that legacies are great for infrastructure, but something like a phone/pocket computer is going to change as quickly as the planting and harvesting seasons the builders needed Stonehenge for in the first place. Infrastructure is not the harvest.
I won’t say that’s just capital-P Progress, but hardware and software have been changing in tandem since their conception. Why wouldn’t we anticipate obsolescence? Why not plan for it? Why shouldn’t a company like Apple or Samsung try for a greener way of building a device than their first shipping versions? I know this is not the way the term is used, but maybe that usage is useless here.
What I find weird is that anyone who argues that unix is more relevant than anything Jobs did, as though these things aren’t completely orthogonal to each other. Most of the reactions to the book in this whole thread strike me as the sort you’d expect when people who don’t understand something’s popularity are suddenly confronted with its reality: lost.
It’s not that they’re stuck in the past: the kernel changes plenty, and I remember when you could install linux with floppies. But, even dead, Jobs is relevant in ways they can’t be and (arguably) are not supposed to be.
(Incidentally, my computer crashed while typing this message, and yet I was able to come back to it on restart without losing a single sentence. Boing Boing has the best comment system on the internet. Well done.)
